And here’s the proof: Use the JUMP program and enjoy the unaccustomed taste of success

Melissa Marsh is a special education co-ordinator at Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw School in Port Hardy, at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Its students include some of the most challenged kids in Canada. Many struggle with learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities and behaviour problems. The community has its share of social issues, and parental involvement is low.

For kids like these, academic failure is depressingly familiar. “The shutdown mode comes extremely quickly,” Ms. Marsh says. But now, kids at this school are experiencing the unaccustomed taste of success in a subject that far more advantaged kids have grown to dread - math.

The JUMP program, pioneered by Toronto mathematician John Mighton, breaks almost every rule of current math pedagogy. It does not depend on the “discovery” method, group work or real-life examples. It is highly structured, relies on a great deal of direct instruction, repetition and reinforcement, and proceeds in small, incremental steps.

It also works.

“Repetition is crucial for many of our students,” says Wayne Peterson, the principal. He adds, “Your regular math texts have too much reading.” JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) is structured so that every kid can solve the problems, one small step at a time. That builds their confidence and self-esteem, and keeps them motivated and engaged. It can get even low achievers excited about math. Teachers say their math skills dramatically improve - and so does their behaviour, their levels of engagement and their attitude.

“The kids aren’t fighting me tooth and nail any more,” says Ms. Marsh. “They know what’s expected. They have the steps set out in front of them and they know they are going to be able to achieve all of those steps. The kids in my special education class go, ‘Whoo-hoo! I did the bonus question and I got it right!’ One Grade 7 student has never been able to sit in math class without completely disrupting it. JUMP has changed that. Today, he participates in class discussion and does the written work by himself.”

The JUMP program is now being used in more than a dozen first nations schools in B.C., as well as in many regular schools in the Vancouver area. “We found that the regular textbook way wasn’t reaching all the kids,” says Christine Hammond, head teacher of N’Kwala School, near Merit. The program is especially effective with her ESL students, because they don’t have to wade through oceans of text. One floundering Innu boy, for example, quickly became a math whiz. The kids at her small band school are now performing at the regional average in math, she says. JUMP is also effective with adult learners, some of whom, after a lifetime of frustration, are getting their GEDs.

Liz Barrett is a South Africa-born educator who travels the province doing outreach and teacher support in first nations schools. For her, proficiency in math is a social justice issue. “These kids are falling by the wayside, and that’s unacceptable. If your students aren’t getting a Grade 12, the door is closed to them.” She discovered the JUMP program four years ago, when she heard Mr. Mighton lecture in B.C., and became a passionate advocate. She’s now helping to launch a JUMP pilot program in South Africa.

Mr. Mighton, 52, is an unusual man. As well as being a mathematician (currently in residence at Toronto’s Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences), he is one of Canada’s best playwrights. He got interested in math education because he thinks the state of numeracy in Canada is a disaster. Judging by the evidence, he’s right. In Ontario, for example, a third of community college students are in danger of failing first-year math. Mr. Mighton also believes we must reverse the “culture of failure” that permeates math education. “There’s no reason the vast majority of kids can’t learn math.”

Ten years ago, Mr. Mighton began tutoring inner-city Toronto kids in his apartment, with great success. The next task was to determine whether JUMP would scale up. He began working to persuade school boards, a far tougher task than he expected. But the initial results have been good. One British inner-city school district, in London, agreed to try it. At the start, the kids were performing an average of two years below the national level in math. After one year of JUMP, 60 per cent of them passed the national exams.

JUMP works for middle-class kids, too. One Toronto teacher used it with her Grade 5 kids, whose math skills at the start of the year ranged from Grade 3 to Grade 7. By the end of the year, every student signed up for the Pythagoras competition, which is written only by top students. Fifteen out of the 17 achieved distinction.

The JUMP program is founded on observation, evidence, teacher feedback, continuous improvement and rigour, combined with new research findings on how the brain learns. By contrast, most programs taught in school are not. For the past couple of decades, both math and reading instruction have been an ideological battlefield that pits the “progressives” - educators who favour good things such as discovery and creativity - against the traditionalists, who favour bad things such as repetition and direct instruction. The progressives have had the upper hand, which is one reason why JUMP has been regarded in some quarters - especially in progressive-minded Ontario - as positively dangerous. Last May, consultants with the Toronto District School Board dismissed JUMP as a form of “rote, procedural learning.” In Ontario, that’s the kiss of death.

Now the tide is turning, though not fast enough. Last spring, the U.S. National Mathematics Advisory Panel endorsed the seemingly obvious idea that, in order to succeed in math, children need to understand what they’re doing.

But the school system is plagued by other barriers that actively discourage best practices. One is the widespread use of consultants, who often write the very textbooks they then are paid to recommend. Some teachers are heavily discouraged from using instructional methods or materials their school board frowns on, even though they work. Many schools and parents are beaten into submission by claims that certain programs are “evidence-based” even though they’re not. There’s a lot at stake in how curriculum decisions are made - but parents and teachers seldom have a clue, or a voice.

So if you’re interested in JUMP for your kid, you may have to move to Vancouver or Port Hardy. You could also check out the JUMP website (jumpmath.org). And Mr. Mighton has written two books, The Myth of Ability and The End of Ignorance. The program survives on charitable support, and he is a more or less full-time volunteer.

“Teachers get so excited by this,” says Liz Barrett. “Suddenly they’ve got the tools to reach the students, and suddenly they’re all achieving.”

Source: Globe and Mail, Canada
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081108.COWENT08/TPStory/National

As a girl, author Peg Tyre didn’t like recess.

But as a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for Newsweek and CNN, Tyre noticed a trend: As schools across the country cut recess, music and other subjects not required by state tests, the number of students taking medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder went up.

“The American Medical Association tells us that 3 to 5 percent of Americans have ADHD,” said Tyre, who spoke at Book Passage in Corte Madera Tuesday and will appear at Redwood High School in Larkspur Thursday night. “Yet the Centers for Disease Control tell us that 14 percent of boys younger than 15 are diagnosed with the condition. I worry about why we’re medicating all these children.”

In her new book, The Trouble With Boys, Tyre argues that the changes schools have made during the past two decades - driven by a focus on standardized test scores - have created a huge disadvantage for boys.

“It used to be that boys did well in math and science, and girls did well in reading and writing,” Tyre said. “But in the last 20 years, girls have caught up in math and science, while boys have been taking a whipping in reading and have fallen behind in writing - at the same time that the whole curriculum has become literacy-based.”

In Marin, seventh-grade girls scored an average of 6 percentage points higher in English and 1 point lower in math on the 2008 California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) exam, according to the state Department of Education. Eleventh-grade girls scored 6 percentage points higher in English and 2 points higher in math on the state’s high school exit exam test for 2008.

Statewide, the gender gap is even greater, with seventh-grade girls scoring 10 percentage points higher on the English portion of the STAR and 10th-grade girls scoring 8 points higher in English on the exit exam.

The problem, Tyre argues, isn’t that boys are less intelligent or capable than girls. It’s that the two genders reach mental and emotional maturity at different ages, she said, and that schools increasingly reward skills like organization and neatness over innovation and risk-taking.

“Girls are completely mature at age 15 to 16, while boys are not there until they’re 25,” said Tyre, basing her argument on neurological studies of adolescent brain scans.

Virginia Dunn nodded in agreement.

“She’s right about the developmental pace,” said Dunn, a retired teacher who works as a reading intervention tutor and family therapist in San Rafael. “I used to teach high school, and around junior year, it was as though something magically happened, and boys began to catch up.”

At a time when success in school can determine so many aspects of people’s lives - where they work, where they live and even when they can retire - the evidence suggests the deck is stacked against boys, Tyre said.

Boys are expelled from preschool at a rate five times that of girls and are twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder or a learning disability, she said. Students in the lowest-performing group at each school tend overwhelmingly to be boys, whether the school is a wealthy private institution or an impoverished neighborhood school.

“Boys learn early on that school is a game they can’t win, and so they decide they don’t want to play,” Tyre said.

Educators have addressed gender as an element of the “achievement gap” between successful and struggling students. Yet county Director of Alternative Education Lisa Schwartz noted that every student falls into a variety of groups, and that each student needs to be treated as an individual.

“Boys probably do better in a more active learning environment,” Schwartz said. “But we need to be paying attention to each individual child. Boys may need a more active, problem-solving curriculum; gifted and talented students need the opportunity to stretch themselves; our English language learners need intensive support to develop their English language skills. We need to focus on a variety of strategies to help kids succeed better in order to be doing our job.”

Tyre doesn’t assign blame to parents, teachers or even distractions like television or video games. Instead, she says parents and teachers need to work together, armed with data, to find ways to make the educational experience better for both genders.

“I grew up with teachers who told me, ‘You don’t have to be a secretary. You can be a lawyer. You don’t have to be a stewardess; you can be pilot.’ That changed the world for girls. They can apply that same attitude to boys.”

Source: Marin Independent-Journal, CA
http://www.marinij.com/ci_10787120?source=most_viewed

Up to 56 per cent of trainee teachers now need multiple attempts before they pass, according to statistics.

The test is designed to drive up standards in the profession and it must be passed before students can qualify as teachers.

However, the trainee teachers are allowed to sit the test as many times as they need and record numbers are failing.

One student reportedly made 27 attempts. Meanwhile, up to a third of trainees need two attempts or more at a similar test in literacy.

The numeracy test takes 48 minutes and contains 12 mental arithmetic questions, to be completed without the aid of a calculator. There are several longer questions with data manipulation which can involve a calculator. The 45-minute literacy test is in four parts – spelling, grammar, punctuation and comprehension.

The figures, obtained in a Commons written answer by the Liberal Democrats, has reignited debate about whether the minimum qualifications for teaching was too low.

The basic skills tests are taken online in literacy, numeracy and ICT and the pass marks are 60 per cent.

In numeracy, the failure rate has risen particularly sharply since the tests were introduced in 2001. Then, trainees needed on average 1.28 attempts to pass.

Last year it was 1.56, with 34,360 trainees taking 53,600 numeracy tests between them.

For literacy, the average number of attempts required to pass was 1.14 in 2001. However, last year 35,150 trainees took 46,460 tests. Most trainees passed their ICT test first time – the average number of attempts required was 1.12.

David Laws, Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said: “The existing minimum qualifications for people wanting to become teachers are too low.

“As the number being accepted on to teaching courses rises, we need to be sure this is not being coupled with a decline in standards.

“Only if we attract the finest quality of young people into teaching will we really be able to drive-up standards in all our schools.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said trainees on some routes into teaching – such as on-the-job training programmes – were exempt from taking the skills tests.

“Ofsted tell us that the standard of teaching training has never been higher and big rises in results show that quality of teaching is improving massively year-in, year-out,” he said.

Soiurce: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/556szn

Schools in England are already amongst the most scrutinised and accountable in the world, yet now a whole new burden of responsibilities is being heaped on them.

First, schools were told they have a responsibility to look out for any indications that their pupils are falling into the grip of extremists and fanatics.

This involves teachers consulting a 47-page checklist of measures to help identify and counter signs that pupils have fallen under the influence of fanatical views.

These signs range from checking whether pupil graffiti betrays the influence of extremism to monitoring pupils’ downloads from the internet. Each school is to have a nominated teacher to whom pupils can turn if they have concerns about the influence of extremist groups.

Teachers are also told they should be ready to counter extreme arguments and should encourage debates to challenge such views.

To be fair, the ‘extremism toolkit’ stresses it is ‘guidance’ to schools, not a new set of requirements. But read on and you find a whole list of ’school actions’ and references to things that schools ‘need’ to do.

As with so many of these initiatives - from healthy eating to promoting citizenship - each is fine on its own but it is the collective burden on schools that can be overwhelming.

Data

And the government continues to pile them on. Following hard on the heels of the ‘extremism toolkit’ came a much bigger set of tick-lists for teachers.

These are the proposed ‘indicators of a school’s contribution to pupil well-being’.

They will apply to all state schools from primary to secondary, including special schools and academies.

The idea is that every school must collect data (yes, even more data!) to measure what they are doing to improve pupils’ physical, moral and mental health.

Naturally, this data will be checked by the education inspectorate, Ofsted. This immediately makes it high-stakes data rather than just a self-evaluation checklist.

So what sort of things will schools now have to do?

Well, in addition to the extensive data on test and exam performance, and the statistics on attendance and exclusions, schools will now have to provide information on the percentage of pupils who are ‘persistent absentees’, that is those who have missed more than one lesson in five.

They will also have to count: the number of pupils doing at least two hours of PE and sport; the numbers taking school meals; and the numbers staying-on in education after age 16.

Alcohol and drugs

But that is only the half of it. Schools will now have to employ opinion surveys of pupils and parents to find out how they think the school is doing on a wide range of well-being measures.

These include: whether the school promotes healthy eating, exercise and a healthy lifestyle; whether it discourages smoking and the misuse of alcohol and drugs; whether it offers good sex education and relationship guidance; whether it fights discrimination, offers a good range of curriculum and extra-curricular activities and the extent to which it encourages community involvement.

There is more. Schools should use these surveys to find whether pupils feel safe and protected from bullying, enjoy school, feel they are listened to, and whether they feel they can influence decisions made in the school.

To be fair to the government, they have dropped some data measures that were in their earlier plans, such as counting how many pupils are obese. Presumably wiser counsel prevailed when the practical issues of checking the weight of every child were considered.

Again, to be fair, the government acknowledges that pupils’ well-being is not entirely a matter for schools and teachers. It is shared by local authorities and, above all, by parents.

They add that the indicators are not judgements. A school may have a terrible set of indicators on attendance or school meal take-up, but there may be mitigating circumstances.

Crude measure

Yet you could forgive schools and teachers for being cynical about such caveats. They have heard them before. Exam results, they were told, were only raw data, not a final judgement. They would not be used on their own to determine whether or not a school was doing a good job.

Yet what do we find in practice? Yes, you guessed it: it is the headline measures, such as the percentage of pupils getting at least five A*-Cs at GCSE, that count, irrespective of more sophisticated data on value added, pupil progress, or pupils’ home backgrounds.

The government’s own list of schools told to improve or risk being closed was based on exactly this crude measure. All the other fine talk and caveats were ignored.

Of course, it is right for schools to consider all aspects of a child’s development, including all five outcomes of the Every Child Matters policy (health, safety, educational achievement, contribution to society and economic well-being).

But to insist on measuring all the aspects of a school’s contribution seems too mechanistic.

Ask anyone what were the biggest influences of school on their lives and they will not tell you about how many school meals they ate, how many times they ran round the school field or how many sex education lessons they sat through.

No, they will tell you about an inspirational teacher or a notable school trip, drama, or sports event.

Schools would say that if we try to measure everything - and hold teachers to account through so much data collection - we risk losing the spontaneity and individuality that should be part of teaching.

Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7663964.stm

The class was working peacefully. It was the first lesson of the morning and everyone was a little bleary-eyed.

Joe Smith, I notice was doodling on a text book. ‘Come on Joe. That’s enough of that. Get on with your work please.’

I was new to teaching and trying to be firm but fair. The next minute, Joe grabbed his neighbour’s pencil case and threw it across the floor. When I remonstrated him he told me to ‘f*** off’.

At the end of the lesson I asked him to stay behind. Demanding an apology, I told him I’d be phoning home as well as reporting his behaviour to the head.

Joe simply shrugged. ‘It’s not my fault. I’m ill. I’ve got ADHD. I can’t help it.’

This was the first time I’d heard of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and I actually laughed. Appalling behaviour an illness? I’d never heard anything so ludicrous.

Now, I can honestly say I don’t think there’s a single class I teach without at least one and often two or three children being medicated with this very powerful class B drug.

Ritalin has unpleasant side effects - including sleeplessness and nausea - and the penalty for selling it illegally is a maximum of 14 years’ imprisonment.

If the answer to these questions is yes, then according to the ‘experts’, the child might well have ADHD. Alternatively, they may simply be a typical boy.

Added to the list of symptoms are, in my experience, extreme rudeness and a dislike of being asked to wear school uniform.

If asked several times to stop talking over me, children with the ‘illness’ generally swear at me.

When I phone their home, their parents react with the uniform comment: ‘He can’t help it. He’s got ADHD.’

Unsurprisingly, an increasing number of doctors and psychiatrists are expressing the fear that children are being labelled with a mental illness and given drugs for behaviour that in the past would simply have been labelled ‘very naughty.’

And anecdotally, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that schools are pressurising parents to put children who cause mayhem on Ritalin.

As a teacher, I’m secretly relieved when I hear that a particularly difficult child, one who won’t do any work, who chats and texts through the lesson, who sneers and swears at staff without a second thought, has been prescribed Ritalin.

The drug isn’t known as the ‘chemical cosh’ for nothing. If I’m honest, though, I don’t believe that these children are ill. I think they come from insecure, unstable backgrounds where the concept of a bedtime is as fanciful as the fairy tales they’ve never been read.

Of course, having an active, boisterous seven-year-old child is hard work. But it seems to me that far too many mums and dads are happy to have their children labelled with a psychiatric condition and drugged - even if the existence of the disorder is hotly disputed by the experts.

Youngsters might be turned into wide-eyed, slow-witted zombies, but at least they’re not running amok in the playground and inconveniencing their parents by getting suspended.

Ritalin, like Valium, has become mother’s little helper. It relieves parents of the responsibility of actually having to discipline their children. But as a society, we may pay a very high price indeed for drugging a generation of our children.

* Frances Childs is a teacher in a comprehensive school in the South of England.

Source: Daily Mail
http://tinyurl.com/4aqr7v

Parents need lessons in how to cope with their children’s unruly behaviour, new guidelines on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) say.

Teachers would also benefit from training to recognise and help children with this condition, it adds.

Any primary school class is likely to have a child with ADHD, experts say.

Most of the estimated 365,000 children in Britain with ADHD receive no treatment at all.

But of those who do, most - about 37,000 - are prescribed stimulants like Ritalin (methylphenidate).

Children with ADHD have extreme difficulty sitting still, learning or concentrating.

At school they may find it hard to keep friends and suffer from bullying because of their behaviour. Looking after affected children can be exhausting for parents.

Parenting classes

The guidelines, which cover England, Wales and Northern Ireland, say parent training and education programmes should be offered as a first-line treatment for ADHD, both for pre-school and school age children.

Drugs remain a first option for children over five and young people with severe ADHD, say the guidelines, but only as part of a comprehensive treatment plan that includes psychological and behavioural interventions.

Dr Tim Kendall, a consultant psychiatrist from Sheffield who is joint director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health and helped draw up the guidelines, said: “There is an over-reliance on medicines.

“Quite commonly, people tend to revert to offering methylphenidate or atomoxetene. When they do that it’s not always because there’s a good balance of risk and benefits. It’s because the child has got what appears to be ADHD and that’s what’s available.

“Its easier to prescribe a drug when other options like parent training programmes are not available.”

Dr Kendall said it was important to diagnose ADHD correctly, rather than label all bad behaviour as ADHD. The symptoms of ADHD persist in all settings - both at school and at home - and cause real impairment.

Andrea Bilbow, chief executive of the ADHD charity ADDISS, welcomed the NICE recommendations but questioned how helpful the parent training programmes would be to parents.

“Parenting programmes are extremely important, but they need to be specific for ADHD.

“The ones that NICE are recommending were designed for the parents of children with conduct disorder, which is completely different from ADHD,” she said.

The Scottish InterCollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) is rewriting its guidelines on ADHD diagnosis and treatment and will take the NICE guidelines into consideration.

Their new guidance will come out in the first half of 2009.

Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7630926.stm

Every occupation has its catch phrases. Tony the barber always said, “You’re right next,” whenever an impatient customer asked how long he’d have to wait for a haircut. When I worked as a carpenter, our daily refrain was a tongue-in-cheek, “Close enough.” In workshops and education courses, teachers are always informed that the breakthrough theory or method that the course is promoting is based on “what the research tells us.” The instructor’s tone is never tongue-in-cheek.

It should be. Consider these sample specimens of actual education research.

A study of juvenile crime, conducted by federal and university experts, determined that most of it happens after school hours, as opposed to during school hours, when most juveniles are in school, or after 11 at night, when most juveniles are in bed.

According to a specialist in teenage sexuality, teenagers who drink alcohol are more likely to wind up having sex. This confirms what teenagers themselves discovered a few generations ago at drive-in movies.

Investigators probing adolescent behavior computed that a 20 cent tax on six-packs of beer would lower gonorrhea rates for 15-to-19-year-olds “by almost 9 percent.” Their precise calculations apparently rest on the assumption that teenagers who are thinking of having sex will decide not to if it costs them each an extra dime.

A bestselling pediatrician-turned-education-expert has deduced that there’s no such thing as a lazy student. His “science” tells him that children never “decide not to make an effort.”

British and American researchers concurred that overweight kids are more likely to be picked on.

A Georgia team discovered that students who study algebra in eighth grade tend to do better in “higher level” ninth-grade math classes. Also there appears to be a correlation between “success” in ninth-grade English and “reading lots of books” in eighth grade.

An ACT-sponsored analysis determined that students who can read “complex” material are more likely to be ready for college than students who can’t read complex material.

Students who are “rejected by their classmates” are “more likely to withdraw from school activities.” Equally astounding, students rejected by their peers in kindergarten are often the same kids rejected by their peers in later grades.

Preschoolers whose parents drink and smoke are more likely to choose alcohol and cigarette accessories for their Barbie dolls.

Students who “rank in the bottom fifth of basic skills have a low probability of completing college.”

Kids with “academically oriented friends” tend to do better academically, while kids whose friends are “delinquent types” are more likely to wind up in trouble.

Impressed?

In 1993 the research conclusively told us that girls were achieving less than boys and were victims of an education “gender gap.” By 1994, these conclusions were “under attack,” and by 1999, the data were telling us that “boys, not girls,” were actually the ones achieving less and the victims of an education “gender gap.” Along the way the research proved that single-sex schooling could solve the problem, at least until a March 1998 report “cast doubt on the value of single-sex schooling,” a charge that was irrefutable until an April 1998 report confirmed the “benefit in single-sex classes.” In 2001, the research demanded that schools “give single-sex classes a chance,” except when it concluded with equal certainty that single-sex programs were a “failure.”

When most people think of research, they picture facts, figures, and experimental results. Unfortunately, in education research most of the numbers we have come from standardized testing, which has proven so unreliable that its reputation for producing meaningful data lies in well-deserved ruins. When the RAND Corp. concludes that today’s standardized tests identify not “good” and “bad” schools, but “lucky” and “unlucky” schools, you’ve definitely got a data problem.

When education researchers aren’t citing faulty numbers, they’re basing their conclusions on feelings. For example, those conflicting gender studies rested on notoriously unreliable student surveys and dubious evidence as weightless as “boys call out in class eight times more often than girls,” which is why scholars and critics complained about “flawed research claims,” a “small body of research,” and “questionable findings.”

Similarly, a 2004 evaluation of Maine’s statewide laptop distribution headlined that laptops made a “significant and positive impact” on the “quality of work and student achievement.” If you read further, though, you found that those rosy conclusions were based on the “perceptions” of “teachers, parents, and students,” on their “opinions, but not actual hard data.” In other words, the evidence consisted of what students and teachers “believed” had happened, not on any documented improvement in student performance.

The American Educational Research Association even endorses a scientific tool they call “data poems,” which experts demonstrated at a professional development seminar offered at the association’s 2002 convention. Employing this method, educators can “focus, interpret, clarify, and communicate qualitative research” by writing and reciting a poem. Researchers have the option of collaborating with a professional poet to revise and polish their “poetic representations of data.”

Don’t look for this species of research at a physicists’ convention.

Education research rarely satisfies real scientific standards. That’s because education isn’t a science. It’s an art and a craft. That doesn’t mean that teachers don’t need knowledge of their subjects, or that I can’t improve my technique in the classroom. But education “research” is fundamentally anecdotal, so that what I observe for free in my classroom isn’t necessarily any less valid or informative than an expensive study of someone else’s classroom, especially when most of those studies are conducted by, and the conclusions drawn by, experts who’ve rarely, if ever, worked in a classroom.

The education establishment has lavished a fortune, often public funds, on research that’s yielded little more than meaningless data and feelings dressed up as evidence. Schools have squandered scant resources and time hopping on a long parade of research-based bandwagons. Even worse, decades of students have been the unwitting guinea pigs of a bastardized pseudoscience that more often suits education experts’ philosophical preferences than it serves either students or the truth.

The nation, its schools, and our students would be better served by common sense.

If the research tells us anything, that’s it.

Source: Rutland Herald
http://tinyurl.com/5ntgjl

Is school breaking our boys? Accumulating evidence says yes:

* Boys are kicked out of preschool at 4.5 times the rate of girls.
* Boys lag behind girls in reading and writing in elementary school, a lag that gets bigger in middle school and high school.
* Teenage boys are four times as likely to commit suicide as girls.
* Girls are doing so much better than boys at academics that by 2016 only 40 percent of college undergraduates are expected to be men.

I saw the roots of this miserable trend up close and personal last week when I visited my daughter’s elementary school lunchroom. The girls sat quietly talking and eating. The boys were jumping up, poking each other, spilling juice, running around the table, smooshing their pb&js into a ball. The lunchroom ladies’ response: Sit down and zip your lip. Yikes! These are 5-year-olds we’re talking about here, and this was their first break after a morning of literacy and math lessons. In kindergarten. Is it any wonder boys might conclude that school is not for them?

So I feel lucky to have come across The Trouble With Boys, a new book by Peg Tyre. Peg’s my kinda gal, a former investigative reporter for Newsweek who doesn’t take anyone’s word for it. She’s also the mother of two sons. When she heard that even at fancy New York private schools the struggling students were almost all male, she decided to investigate, looking for solid data as to why. What she found isn’t pretty. Among her findings:

• Teachers and principals know that boys are struggling but feel it’s politically incorrect to suggest that the curriculum needs to be changed to help boys.

• Schools have cut recess and gym and increased classroom time to boost test scores, but the lack of exercise is actually making it harder for boys (and girls) to learn.

• Most reading curricula are based on narrative fiction that turns off boys. How many boys want to read Little House on the Prairie?

There’s a lot of misinformation out there on how boys learn, Tyre found. She cites the example of Michael Gurian, who tells teachers at his popular workshops that neuroscientists have identified a “boy brain” that is less adept at staying focused than is a “girl brain.” At first, Tyre thought this made sense. But then she took the next step and asked the neuroscientists who did the research Gurian cites if this is true. They all said, no way do we know enough about the brain to say there’s a “boy brain.” “When we talk about gender, we’re talking about something that’s pretty complicated,” Tyre told me. “It’s not just nature. It’s not just nurture.” And there will be no simple solutions. But there are smart parents, smart teachers, and smart principals out there who are trying their own experiments to help boys, and getting good results. Tyre’s reporting provides solid information that parents can act on now:

• Boys do much better at reading and writing when the subject matter matches their interests. Savvy parents offer nonfiction books and stories with action and don’t cringe when their darling wants to write about Pokémon or Star Wars. Who cares if the kid’s reading Captain Underpants or The Day My Butt Went Psycho, as long as he loves to read?

• Dads can encourage their sons to read by reading to them on topics they both love. One smart school invited uniformed police officers (macho male ones) to come read to the kids each day.

• Find out how much PE and movement time your child gets, and advocate for more. Research unequivocally shows that all kids do better in school when they get plenty of time to run, jump, and play, and boys need time for tag and other rambunctious games. When you have your kids at home on the weekend, Tyre notes, you don’t keep them locked inside from 8 to 3 because you know they’ll turn into screaming meemies if you do.

All parents want their children to grow up to be happy and successful. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if reading The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts helped boys get there?

Source: U.S. News & World Report
http://tinyurl.com/6movp5

Times Tables, the Key to Your Child’s Success?

When did you lose interest in math? Never had any? Maybe, but Eugenia Francis knows exactly when it started to happen to her son. The moment? The dread rite of passage all children face: the multiplication tables.

As her son struggled with endless drills, Francis realized there had to be a better way. Why not learn the tables in context of one another and emphasize the commutative property (i.e. 4 x 6 is the same as 6 x 4) of the multiplication tables? Francis drew a grid for tables 1-10 and discovered patterns for her son to decode. The mysteries of the times tables unfolded as a daily exploration of “magic” never discussed in his third-grade class. Their fridge eventually was papered with patterns that made the times tables intriguing. “Patterns made my son smile,” Francis says. “He could see the structure and knew he got it right.”

Ever the creative educator, Francis taught college English. “Patterns whether in literature or math,” she says, “reveal the underlying structure. There is an inherent simplicity in them, an inherent beauty. Math should engage your child’s imagination.”

At the kitchen table, Francis applied her skills to math. Why not learn the tables in order of difficulty? Tables 2, 4, 6 and 8 are easy to learn as they end in some combination of 2-4-6-8-0. Tables for odd numbers also have distinct patterns. Why not a more creative approach? Thus was born Teach Your Child the Multiplication Tables, Fun, Fast and Easy with Dazzling Patterns, Grids and Tricks! (available on Amazon and www.TeaCHildMath.com ) and mom the entrepreneur.

Patterns appeal to children. Learning to recognize patterns teaches analytical skills. A review in California Homeschool News stated: “My daughter thinks it’s lots of fun. She’s already had quite a few ‘ah-ha moments as she recognizes and predicts the various patterns.” Patterns enhance recall. “Children with ADHD, dyslexia and autism do well with my method,” Francis says.

Parents and teachers must ensure children learn the multiplication tables. “Without them a child is doomed,” Francis states. A child who has not mastered the times tables has difficulty succeeding in mathematics beyond the third grade.

A recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times noted that failure to pass Algebra I was the “single biggest obstacle to high school graduation” and that failure to master the multiplication tables was one of the main reasons. A survey of California Algebra I teachers report that 30% of their students do not know the multiplication tables. It is hardly surprising then that fifteen-year olds in the U.S. rank near the bottom of industrialized nations in math skills.

“We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world,” Bill Gates stated. “If we keep the system as it is, millions of children will never get a chance to fulfill their promise because of their Zip Code, their skin color or their parents’ income. That is offensive to our values.”

Teachers must innovate and bring the magic of math into the classroom. Parents must do their part. “Parents have a huge influence over a third or fourth grader,” Francis states. “By high school it may be too late. Why not take the opportunity that teaching the multiplication tables provides to give your child a head start in math and develop analytical skills necessary for algebra? Mastery of the multiplication tables is essential to your child’s future.”

Francis published her innovative workbook to help other families. “If more of us would do for other people’s children what we do for our own, the world would be a better place.”

About Eugenia Francis
Eugenia Francis taught English at the University of California at Irvine. Faced with the challenge of teaching her son the multiplication tables, she developed her own innovative method, discovering patterns to the multiplication tables. She has also published a Spanish edition of the workbook. Teach Your Child the Multiplication Tables sells on Amazon in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Japan.

Source: NewsBlaze, CA
http://newsblaze.com/story/20080913052623zzzz.nb/topstory.html

Like many other foreign journalists, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Finland to learn how this country has climbed to the top spots in key international rankings measuring economic, political and social success. The answer, I was told, is amazingly simple.

First, the facts. Finland ranks first among 179 countries in Transparency International’s index of the least corrupt nations in the world (the United States is No. 20); No. 1 in Freedom House’s ranking of the world’s most democratic countries (the U.S. ranks No. 15); No. 1 in the world in 15-year-old students’ standardized test scores in science (the U.S. ranks No. 29), and is among the 10 most competitive economies in the World Economic Forum’s annual competitiveness index (the U.S. topped the list this year).

A small country of 5.3 million, which only two decades ago was by most measures the poorest country in northern Europe, Finland also boasts the headquarters of the world’s biggest cellphone maker — Nokia — and cutting edge paper and pulp-technology firms.

The Finnish success story has triggered curiosity around the world, especially in Latin America, where most countries have yet to make the transition from exporters of raw materials to producers of high-tech goods that sell for much higher prices in world markets.

THE KEY

How did you do it, I asked Finnish President Tarja Halonen in an interview.

”I can sum it up in three words: education, education and education,” she said.

Finland invested more than most other countries in recent decades to create an excellent tuition-free education system. That has helped it make the jump from an agrarian, timber-based economy into a technological powerhouse, she said.

And what is the secret of your education system, I asked. Among other things, highly trained elementary-school teachers, she said.

”We have a long queue outside our ministry of education with all kinds of experts from different countries who would like to learn more from our system,” Halonen said. “But what they don’t normally believe is that the answer is as simple as having good teachers.”

WELL-PAID

Indeed, from what I saw during my five-day visit to Finland, teachers are relatively well-paid and enjoy great social respect. You need at least a master’s degree to teach in elementary school, and a college degree to teach in kindergarten. Only one of every 10 applicants is admitted to the Finnish universities’ teachers colleges.

”The profession of teacher is becoming increasingly popular, especially among women,” said Ossi Airaskorpi, principal of the Juvanpuisto School, nearly an hour’s drive from Helsinki. “In the 1980s and 1990s, everybody wanted to go into business. Now, they want to be teachers. They can do part of their work at home, get a relatively good salary and have a two-and-a-half-month vacation.”

Dropping into a first-grade classroom at the Juvanpuisto school, about an hour outside Helsinki, I saw a teacher tutoring her students, while an assistant sat at one of the tables with a group of children, whispering into their ears to help them understand something they had missed.

ONE-ON-ONE

Next door, there was a little room where a ‘’special teacher” was giving a one-on-one lesson to a girl who needed extra help.

One-on-one classes help narrow the gap between good students and those lagging behind, which helps explain why Finland does so well in standardized international tests that measure the learning skills of all students, not just the best ones.

In addition, Finnish schools use a special computer program where parents can log in every night to get the latest news about their kids — whether they missed school, were talking on cellphones during class or need to do extra homework.

My conclusion: Granted, Finland also rates high in other rankings in which it would rather not be, such as having one of the world’s highest suicide rates. Halonen was quick to add that Finland’s suicide rates have dropped in recent years and are similar to those of Japan and other countries.

But Finland could be an excellent example for Latin American commodity exporters who want to become high-technology producers. They could help themselves by remembering this country’s three little secrets: education, education and education.

Source: MiamiHerald.com, FL
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/andres-oppenheimer/story/671261.html