Posted on 08/09/2022 10:47:49 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The 20 soon-to-be San Francisco fourth-graders sat on the classroom rug Tuesday and puzzled over the math word problem: If you have 14 stickers want to give three to each friend, how many friends will get stickers?
“This is garbage,” said one student, frustrated by what he and many of his peers described as an impossible scenario.
“So how do we solve this garbage?” the John Muir Elementary School teacher asked.
Nearby more than a dozen teachers from four city public schools huddled around the students, taking notes on the teaching method while observing body language and other indicators of understanding.
While the kids were learning about division with remainders, the educators were hoping to unlock the secret of Muir’s math test scores, which exceed the district average overall and particularly for students of color.
Since 2015, Muir has had a math pilot program in place, which focuses on student-led instruction; uses a specific intervention curriculum to help lagging students catch up; and provides consistent teacher training and coaches for math teachers. Now, with a city-funded $4 million grant, district officials are expanding the program to three additional schools, hoping to create a proof of concept before adopting the teaching methods district-wide.
The effort is the district’s latest effort to tackle a pervasive and shocking achievement gap in what is one of the wealthiest cities in the country.
Across the district, 72% of Asian American students and 69% of white students were proficient or above in math in 2019, the most recent statewide test scores available, compared to 14% of Black students and 21% of Latino students.
Similar disparities were found in literacy rates.
The district’s strategy starts with a laser focus on students and their academic and emotional well-being, followed by a commitment to identify effective programs and spend money on what works, district officials said.
Based on standardized test scores, math instruction at Muir is working.
At the Western Addition school, 56% of Black students and 59% of Latino students were proficient or above in math in 2019. The school didn’t have enough white or Asian American students to register on state test score reports.
Four years earlier, the math proficiency rates were significantly lower — 21% among Latino students and 12% for Black students.
The math program at the school includes significant teacher training, including watching other teachers teaching while also using a math intervention curriculum called “Do the Math” for struggling students while also coordinating within a team of teachers to get support and feedback.
Instruction focuses on getting students to think problems through and to help each other learn, or what’s called “teaching through problem solving,” officials said.
The end result has been a giant leap in test scores in both math and language arts as well as teacher retention. Productive, supported and successful teachers stay, said Muir Principal Sara Liebert.
“I’ve been fully staffed since May,” she said, acknowledging most district schools still had vacancies Tuesday, a week before school starts.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen, with school board member Matt Alexander worked together to create the $4 million pilot program to duplicate the math instruction model at Flynn, Malcolm X and Sanchez elementary schools over a two-year period.
“When we discovered that this model was so successful, we wanted to scale it up at other schools to see if it can be applied with equal success at different sites under similar conditions,” Ronen said. “The promising results of the initial program pushed us to think creatively about how this can be expanded across the district.”
Ronen hopes votes will pass a charter amendment that would funnel $70 million into city schools, using excess property tax money, with the funding exclusively for boosting student academic achievement and wellness. That can include supporting math programs like the one at Muir or paying for additional nurses, counselors, math tutors, literacy coaches and more.
The $4 million to replicate the Muir math model is the kind of spending Ronen envisions.
Back on the carpet in the John Muir auditorium, students huddled over clipboards and paper trying to figure out how many friends could get three stickers if you had 14 stickers to share. Minutes ticked by until one student, Angela, got it and then stood in front of her classmates to explain the answer was four friends — albeit with two stickers left over.
What one would do with the extra stickers might be a conundrum, but that doesn’t mean you can’t answer the question, the lesson showed.
“In division, sometimes we have extra,” the teacher said. “And that’s OK.”
As realization spread across the faces of the 9-year-old students, the teachers smiled.
The students “become the teachers and they get to be the experts for each other,” said third grade teacher Ashley Hughes, after helping demonstrate the lesson Tuesday. “I love those ah-ha moments.”
With the students’ minds opened to new possibilities, the goal of teaching simple division with remainders appeared to be a success.
“It was a little bit challenging,” said one of the students, Tayah Everette, 9, as she filed out of the model classroom, noting she used multiplication strategies to figure out the answer. It had been a surprise, she said, to learn division answers can have leftovers.
Math, she added, is her favorite subject. Why? Her answer was a simple calculation: “I think it’s fun.”
white IQ 100, black IQ 85. Subtract 85 from 100 and you get 15. That pretty much explains the education gap between blacks and whites. Of course, we aren’t supposed to talk about IQ anymore.
And the creation of the Department of Education by Carter accelerated the decline.
“Raising black scores is hard.
Crippling white kids achievement is easy.
Guess what they will do?”
Or dumb down the test so even a turnip can get an A.
“Math is racists and a product of White Supremacy.”
The leftists can’t seem to get their story straight. If math is racist you certainly don’t want to spend big bucks teaching it!
Text books, especially math ones, seem to be the proof of the real meaning of Santayana's famous quote.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.Textbooks seem to be changed every few years for no good reason (other than to employ textbook writers) and with no effort to retain what is good and from there improve them. Has math changed in the past hundred years, especially math below the level of graduate school in college? Other than removing some references to gramophones in the story problems the old books will do the job.
If a new way of teaching is found or it is found that teaching multiplication before subtraction is more effective then put that in new books. But it seems like most textbook changes are for educational fads or just changing for the sake of selling schools something new even if less effective.
They misspelled meth.
They not going to change nor close the alleged ‘math gap’, period.
= = =
They are closing the gap by trying to lower everyone to the bottom.
[[Or dumb down the test so even a turnip can get an A.]]
Dumbing down the course has the same effect of crippling the education of all those who could have benefited from a more rigorous course.
According to the White House, "2 + 2 = 10% for the Big Guy."
A reminder to the denizens of SF: Hope is not a strategy.
Saxon math
The only answer.
Sadly at one time they were a gold standard
O/T, but my 4th grade teacher could have been a concubine of Attila the Hun...she was one mean woman...lol.
However, every week we started with 20 new words. The drill went: write them each five times, test on Friday, lather rinse repeat.
By the end of the year, you had a core of 600-700 words that you could correctly spell by heart. I call that a very good start.
I enjoyed the "Gonzaga Experience" far too much. I ended with a 2.94 GPA, with a BBA in Public Accounting. I wasn't as diligent in my studies as I should have, as I knew I had a 4 year job waiting for me in the Army.
I paid a price: instead of Finance Corps, commanding a desk for 4 years, they put me in Air Defense Artillery, with 4+ years in Germany (6th Battalion, 56th ADA, motto "Night Hides Not").
It worked out well, believe it or not. I put that accounting degree to use as Battalion Supply Officer (S-4). My counterparts at higher HQ never messed with us, they were intimidated by my degree, and my ability to apply it practically.
I had great NCOs, and we had a fantastic section. During our annual IG, I welcomed my evaluator, a Major, by saying, "Welcome to the Best S-4 in 32nd AADCOM! Please have a seat, I've got a few bones to pick with you." I then briefly laid out my issues with him, in a friendly way, which he couldn't rebut.
At the outbriefing, he said, "LT NHN told me he had the best S-4 section in the command. I found no reason to disagree with him."
[[But it seems like most textbook changes are for educational fads or just changing for the sake of selling schools something new even if less effective.]]
It’s for revenue to the publishers. Otherwise the same texts could be used year after year.
A school could make publishers go crazy by just grabbing old texts which are out of copyright, and making them downloadable onto tablets.
There should be open-source downloadable texts for most subjects through college, but it won’t happen because professors and administrators get a cut.
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