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.”
Blind leading the blind.
I came out of a rural southern school that had lousy marginal math instructors. My brother (who is today a electrical engineer) was 6 years behind me.
At some point around the 8th grade (he was bucking the system and doing well), had some girl who’d had straight marginal grades for a long time, come to him and ask for help.
He gave her 15 minutes a day of simplified math tutoring...explaining it in a way that made sense. In six ways, her grades changed. At the end of high school, she went onto college, and eventually became a teacher. Somewhere around age 35, she looked him up and admitted his way of looking at math problems and explaining this in a simple way...made the difference.
What we have are crappy math books, and half the math-instructor population just not capable of getting a point across.
[[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.]]
Their focus is on closing the embarrassing “achievement gap”.
Raising black scores is hard.
Crippling white kids achievement is easy.
Guess what they will do?
Math is racists and a product of White Supremacy.
2+2=5
They not going to change nor close the alleged ‘math gap’, period.
Foolish to live in San Francisco. Even more foolish to let your kids attend public school in San Francisco.
Learning math requires homework, practice, and the self-discipline to do these things. Not easy for today’s spoiled, fatherless kids with no respect for authority.
Why are students sitting on a rug? There was value in rote memorization and desks with chairs
Ghetto and math don’t mix.
This is way down in the middle of the story. Talk about burying the lead.
If these improvements in scores are real, and if they are sustainable, these are great results.
Assuming that the test hasn't been gimmicked and that the student pool is comparable across the years studied (no cherrypicking; no redrawing of boundaries), this is a remarkable improvement. Now prove that it's real. Do it next year in ten schools, then a hundred, and sustain it over time.
P.S. I have always believed that the collapse of urban public education started with the deliberate dumbing down of the curriculum, educationally counterproductive changes in standards of behavior, shifts in the skillsets being demanded of teachers, etc. The public schools walked away from old, traditional methods and disciplines that WORKED, in favor of increasingly Mad Hatter gimmicks to try to shortcut their way to success. The damage is largely self-inflicted, though the rise in illegitimacy, drug use, social media addiction and myriad other social problems is real as well. This may be a case of reinventing the wheel. In a modern leftist dominated school system, simply acknowledging that the old methods were better is probably not politically feasible. Reformers will have to camouflage and relabel what they are doing. If test scores are really improving, it’s because the kids are practicing a lot harder. (Assuming the test hasn’t been gimmicked.) So the question is, how is the school inspiring the kids to do the work?
We have truly lousy math instruction. I passed my classes but I hated math and I didn’t really “get it” until I took a math course for teachers. The instructor was a master teacher who used a Montessori-based math instruction system.
There is still a lot of simple memorization that makes it easier and faster (times tables, for example), and that shouldn’t be neglected. But I found that the kids really “got it” with her method, including older kids who had been doing badly.
One of the particular problems with black children, however, is that their language skills are often so poor that it’s hard to get the concepts across using any method. Not requiring standard English in the classrooms (or not teaching it in the first place) does not help black children in any subject, including math.
Get rid of common core!!!!
Am I the only one that can put a date as to when American public education started on it’s downward slide?
1954
I was subbing in an elementary math class, couldn’t figure out how they add. Told them to just memorize the tables. By the way I’m a summa cum laude graduate
Those crappy math books and teachers are part of the plan.
Just take a look at what the “common core” standards did to math.
At first I read it as “Meth Gap”.
Now add 10, subtotal
then plus 1, subtotal
then add 3 more for ‘busing”
Now subtotal again . . .
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