To me, when the “news” about a charter school is “good,” it usually has to do with a typical scandal about embezzlement or inappropriate “teaching” methodologies. However, when the “real” news outlet, The “Not-Failing” New York Times published an article about a Brooklyn charter replacing its “no excuses” discipline code with a more humane and “loving” environment, well, that passes as “good news” to me.

Surprise! Treating students with warmth and respect promotes better behavior AND more learning!

Not that this makes me a fan of charter schools. It did lead to a discussion/argument that took place between me and my girlfriend, whom I love and adore, and sometimes even agree with on occasion. Her position, which is common among those unfamiliar with the charter school issue, is that parents need an alternative to “dangerous” public schools. It is a narrative that charter supporter have promoted, but does it have any basis in reality?

This myth goes as follows: a poor person, usually one of color and desperate to give her  child the “best education” possible has heard through some poorly informed person that the local public school has low test scores and lots of “bad kids.” Wishing to avoid this fate, he/she visits a charter where she sees a very orderly environment where children sit with their hands in their laps, eyes straight ahead, and aren’t those uniforms adorable? I want that!

Indeed, the myth is somewhat true, if only you omit a few certain “facts,” which we know are not valued very highly this day. The most salient “fact” is that many neighborhood public schools are dangerous places with low test scores, so you can’t blame parents for looking for safe and effective teaching environments. On the surface, there is an aura of truthiness about this, but looking below the surface, the myth proves to be what it is: a carefully crated and widely promoted myth. Let’s examine the the facts one by one:

Myth: Public Schools are dangerous places. If you look at the the nation’s largest school district, New York City, there are exactly 4 schools listed as “persistently dangerous.” Less you think these are high schools with high rates of gun violence and assaults, as it turns out that these are elementary schools serving poor children in dangerous neighborhoods. Contrary to the pro-charter narrative, these schools have not been ignored by the Department of Education: in fact, these schools have received extra resources from the D.O.E. to help create a safer environment where students and teachers can work together.

In fact, the only reason charter schools “appear” safer is because they have much less tolerance for disruptive students, suspending them at extremely high rates. Frustrated charter school parents, who become fed up with a child sent home from school repeatedly, end up pulling their kids from the charter and sending their kid to the “dangerous” public school. This allows the charter to go about its business free from dealing with disruptive children, some of whom may have undiagnosed mental illnesses, leaving them to the social workers and teachers who have to treat them at the PS down the block.

Myth: Public Schools Do Not Educate Their Students: I consulted at a public school in the Tremont section of the Bronx for about 6 months. I’m not going to say this school was not without its problems, but the odds were stacked against them from the get go. First, it served primarily an immigrant population, which meant that many students were not fully proficient in English. The second issue is that it was obligated to accept any student who walked in the door at any time, which included a disruptive first grader who was expelled from a local charter almost three-quarters of the way into the school year. The third was that everybody was required to take the mandated standardized tests, which included a class of adorable, intellectually challenged third graders who could barely count reliably to ten, much less solving a two step word problem. Add it together, and you end up with a bunch of fake test scores that don’t give the full picture of how a school performs.

Myth: Charter Schools are Public Schools: This was the biggest bone of contention between me and my otherwise smart and sweet girlfriend and me. She insisted that a charter school is a public school because it receives taxpayer money, as opposed to private schools, which are funded through tuition, donations and endowments. I said this was only partially true: unlike public schools, charters have much more “freedom” to serve only certain kinds of students, as they often don’t offer services for children who have learning disabilities, mental health issues or are English language learners. They are also not obligated to hire certified teachers and they can make demands on teachers, children and parents that are illegal in “real” pubic schools. Finally, they can create their own policies for discipling students, as well as not accepting students after the start of the school year.

If you were to limit the definition of a public school to its source of funding, then yes, charter schools are “public schools.” But if you include features like “open to all students at any time,” and “use certified teachers” and “offers supports for children who are learning disabled, or are not yet proficient in English, or have emotional handicaps,” then charter would fall far short. In fact, when charter supporters chant the slogan “charter schools are public schools,” they are talking about their funding sources only (and even that is not true: many charters get their cash through idle hedge fund managers and rap artists who have nothing better to do than destroy the public school system in which they were educated.) Charter schools are not by any stretch of the imagination public schools.

With the discussion getting heated, my wonderfully warm girlfriend and I declared a truce. She admitted that the issue was very confusing, and I agreed it was. And then we kissed, declared our love for one another, even when having heated discussion, and went out to enjoy the final day of winter.

I’m no fan of how the New York Times covers mathematics education, but every once in  while they find someone who has an interesting voice and even an argument that stands up to even the most minimal scrutiny. Andrew Hacker is back for a repeat performance at the Times, which is okay by my. I enjoyed his previous op-ed about algebra being necessary, and now he’s managed to roll this premise into a full length book. It only took 4 years (his original screed debuted almost 4 years ago), but I guess these things take time. Think of all the trees that had to be grown, pulped, bleached and then inked to get this thing into print!

Even though his book looks like an interesting read, I’m probably going to wait a few months before I pick up a copy on Amazon Marketplace, where it will be available for half the hard cover price of $17.95 (but where it will always sell for $14.95 on the Kindle, for some odd reason…)  Here’s an interesting problem that Hacker could work on: how will the price of his hardcover book decrease over the next few months compared to the ebook price. Here’s my prediction:

Or better yet, I’ll just download an e-copy from the library and read it for free!

My 17 year old son goes to a pretty good high school, and for the most part, I have not interfered with the more nefarious activities so far as curriculum goes. It hasn’t been that easy: a few years back I informed my son’s 6th grade math teacher that he was a “total disgrace” based on the math my son was doing in his class, but other than that, I’ve tried to offer honey whenever I could. NYC public school teachers are a resistant lot (I think it’s written into their contracts) and now that both my kids are pretty much finished with the public school system, I have fewer dogs in the fight. I have many bones to pick with the educational-industrial complex, but I try to keep my kids out of the fray.

But this doesn’t stop me from calling out some of the more sacred cows in education, and in this post, I’m going to take aim at something called The Stock Market Game. I have no doubt that the people who invented and run these kinds of investigations have good intentions, but if you know anything about how the stock market works, you would understand that teaching children about finances by investing in the stock market is like teaching sex education by watching  pornography.

Yes, you read that correctly.

While the details of each version of the stock market game are different, the concept is essentially the same: individuals or groups of students are given a cash stake that only an heir to a successful real estate mogul would have access to, invest the money in a portfolio of stocks, and then follow how their “investment” grows or shrinks during the ensuing weeks or months.

Let’s begin with some facts: 22% of all children in the United States live in poverty. It is almost certain that their parents have not and will not ever have any involvement in the stock market, and since most people end up owning stocks through inheritance, the chances that these children will go on to own stocks is pretty small. For many children, playing the stock market game will end up teaching children about an aspect of our economic system that they will never be able to participate in.

Similarly, pornography promotes the same misunderstanding of human sexuality. It presumes that everyone is well endowed (both men and women) and therefore they can engage in this kind of activity. The chances that anybody will engage in sexual behavior of this type if pure fantasy. At best, viewers of pornography should understand that these highly sculpted bodies are not “real,” just as students engage in the stock market game understand it is far, far different from the reality of investing in stocks.

Second, the stock market game promotes all the wrong behaviors when it comes to personal finance. In the game, students are encouraged to invest a huge amount of money all at once, and then buy and sell without the consequences of paying fees or taxes. This promotes “short term” investment behaviors, which time and time again has been shown to be a losing strategy. As any successful investor knows, the optimal way to invest is through slow accumulation, continual reinvestment and holding stocks for the long term.

Similarly, pornography promotes the same kinds of behaviors when it comes to human relationships. The selling point of pornography is to de-emphasize long term intimacy and promote short term gains. In a pornographic film, “success” is defined by obtaining satisfaction from short term encounters, without the consequences of alienation, not to mention the risk of sexually transmitted diseases.

Finally, playing the stock market game gives a completely inaccurate representation of the career opportunities in the financial industry. Anybody who works in investing and finance knows that most stock picking is not done by individual investors, but by highly complex computer algorithms that make decisions and carry out these decisions in a billionth of a second. This kind of behavior leads companies to cheat their investors as well as their customers, all in the interest of supporting their stock prices.

Pornography suffers from exactly the same delusion when applied to sexuality. It proposes that anybody could engage in this kind of life of hedonism, without suffering from any of its consequences. The reality is that pornographic films are highly scripted, the actors are most likely exhausted and poorly paid, and becoming a highly paid “star” is very, very rare. While most viewers probably know that pornography is staged, the reality of working in the adult film industry may not be apparent to everyone.

Okay, so I’m not a fan of the stock market game; am I suggesting that we toss out the whole idea of economic education in schools? No way!  In fact, my daughter took a “personal finance” class during her senior year in school and instead of wasting their time on the stock market game, they actually learned about how to manage the money that they may actually have. This included things like learning about bank fees, tax rates, investing for retirement, credit card interest rates and understanding compound interest and mortgages. That would be a financial education that would be a bazillion times more effective than playing the stock market game.

Unless, of course, we begin to believe our students should be making adult films?

This just in:

““Brain training” company Lumosity just settled deceptive-advertising charges with the Federal Trade Commission for $2 million. The company will have to notify its customers about the settlement and allow them to easily remove any auto-billing they have on their accounts.”

Well, duh?

I’ve been listening to Lumosity’s commercials on the local public radio stations, and what a better place to advertise but to neurotic white, liberal, New Yorkers, whose greatest fear is losing their mind and what? thinking that Ted Cruz and Donald Trump actually make an iota of sense.

My question: where did Lumosity find the neuroscientists who actually agreed to lend their talents to this nefarious venture?

Just like Bernie Madoff’s regular 8.1% annual investment returns were “too good to be true,” so I was suspicious of Lumosity’s claims to have developed a “brain training program,” that would stave off dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Despite the fact that they paid a huge fine for false advertising, Airborne products are alive and well. I wonder which clinic “proved” they are effective?

I doubt this is going to stop Lumosity from marketing their quackery in the future, just as Airborne payed a $23 million suit over false advertising for convincing gullible buyers that their products don’t actually boost the immune system or prevent colds from happening (Airborne is still alive and well, peddling their remedies in stores all over the country.)

I do workshops on neuroscience and numeracy and unlike the mendacious hucksters who run shops like Lumosity, I actually base my work and suggestions on ACTUAL RESEARCH! This means that I don’t endorse any “do this and it’ll raise test scores overnight” dictates; instead, I make recommendations that will help teachers understand why their students struggle with things like learning the multiplication tables, or why certain language is more conducive to understanding mathematics than others.

Unfortunately, it is companies like Lumosity that puts the “real” findings in neuroscience in a bad light. This is a very young field of study, and we have to be careful about what we accept as “truth” when looking at what is being marketed at us. I figured eventually “Lumosity” would get caught eventually, I just wonder why I had to listen to hundreds of commercials before anybody caught on….

As mentioned in my previous post, Robert subscribes to a homegrown philosophy of “good” math teaching that relies on some simple principles. His first one, The Vidal Sassoon Principle, focuses on making teachers look good through encouragement and “having their back” if something they try doesn’t go as planned. Today we’ll look at another part of Robert’s coaching philosophy, which he calls “The Sy Syms Principle.”

What did this schmata salesman have to say about math coaching?

Sy Syms, if you were growing up in the New York area in the 70’s, owned a chain of men’s clothing stores called, yes, “Syms.” While Robert never had the opportunity to shop at Syms (he was more of a “Gap” sort of guy, before they went all khaki), he never forgot the tagline on Sy’s commercials: “An educated consumer is our best customer.” This can be reconfigured in several ways to fit what happens in the classroom, including “a well informed educator is our best teacher…..”

So what does this have to do with Singapore Math? First, many schools adopt this curriculum, or its bastardized variants, with the belief that if they slavishly “teach the book,” including the “bar model,” their students will generate the same math scores that puts Singapore at the top of all international comparisons. Sure, this is an admirable goal, but any school that adopts this curriculum based solely on international scores is going to be very, very disappointed in the results.

What the sales people for these curricula are loath to reveal is that Singapore is a very, very different country than the USA, and that unless you are prepared to adopt every single feature of that country’s educational system, you’re not going to get anywhere near the results found in their math program.

Behind the numbers on Singapore’s math “achievement.”

There are many elements that skew math scores in favor of Singapore, which includes year round education (students in Singapore go to school in July and August, believe it or not….) and a very low child poverty rate (8.2% versus 22% in the United States), both of which alone would account for much of the disparity, setting aside curriculum.

But there are two nefarious features of education in Singapore that we might want to consider before admiring it as an educational leader. Unlike the US, Singapore only provides limited educational services for students with physical or intellectual impairments, and exempts them from testing (which includes international comparisons.)

Q: What do you think these students in Singapore are doing after school and on weekends? A: Going to more math classes!

But the chief reason for Singapore’s educational success can be placed on the omnipresence of Singapore’s “cram schools,” which are attended by 97% of the school-aged population. These educational centers, which have been termed the “tuition industrial complex,” are highly profitable enterprises which students attend in the evening and on weekend. In fact, if you add up the low rate of child poverty in Singapore, the fact that schooling is year round (and omits those with disabilities) and the influence of “cram schools,” the actual effect of using the Singapore Math is diminished even further.

So what does this all have to do with Sy Syms? As Robert is fond of saying, “an informed math teacher is an effective math teacher,” which means that the next time a teacher is asked why the school does not use Singapore Math, he/she has an answer that is both wise and based on actual information, instead of random test numbers.

I’m always amused when teachers try to censor correct children’s language, especially when it comes to mathematics. I remember observing a kindergarten teacher working with a child on the names of the pattern block shapes, and the child correctly identifying the orange square and the green triangle without hesitation. When the blue “rhombus” showed up, things took a turn for the worse. The child looked it over and said, “oh, that’s a diamond!” and the teacher said, “no, it’s a rrrr…….” trying to prompt the young man to say the word “rhombus,” which I’m probably going to bet he never heard in his life. The child looked confused and said, “riamond?” The teacher shook her head, and explained, “no, it’s a rhombus. Can you say that?”

How many rhombi do you see in this picture?

I know that as teachers we like to fulfill our missions by trying to find that “teachable moment” when we can introduce a new word or idea to our students, but as my college art professor, the great Walter Feldman once said, “it’s not what you show, but also what you don’t show that matters.”  In this case, the teacher most likely created a misunderstanding that will stay with the child for many years to come.

The word “rhombus” is a very complicated concept (and yes, nouns can be concepts) and for many years I’ve asked teachers not to introduce this particular term until 4th grade. This may seem like “dumbing down” the curriculum by not introducing a “fancy” word early and often, but in reality, it makes great sense, especially when you consider the development of logical thinking in children.

A rhombus is an example of a shape that has a particular set of characteristics that is not exclusive. A rhombus is a simple closed curve, a polygon, a quadrilateral and a parallelogram. It can be a rectangle and it can be a square. When it is a square, it becomes a type of rectangle, but when it isn’t a square, it remains a “rhombus,” which is not to be confused with a “rhomboid,” which is a parallelogram where the adjacent sides are not equal and where the angles are not right angles.

What we have here is a failure to communicate…

If this is confusing you, then imagine what it must be to a child. Basically, our language for geometric shapes is lacking in that we don’t have exact words for the shapes that include some properties but lack others. For example, a parallelogram describes all quadrilaterals that have 4 sides, where the opposite sides are congruent and parallel. We then have a word for the parallelogram that has 4 right angles: a rectangle. What we don’t have is a name for the parallelogram that does not have 4 right angles. We call it a “parallelogram,” but if we do, then it would exclude the “rectangle.” The best we can do is explain that a “rectangle” is simply a special case of the parallelogram, and go on to admit that there is no word for the parallelogram that is not a rectangle.

Things become considerably more difficult when we discuss the rhombus. A rhombus is a type of parallelogram, for it also has 2 sets of parallel sides which are also congruent. However, a rhombus is another special case of a parallelogram, for it occurs when all 4 sides are equal. Simple, but not so simple….

This is where that nasty shape, “the square,” shows up at the intersection of two different ways to classify shapes: it is linked to the rhombus by having all 4 sides equal, but it is also linked to the rectangle by having 4 right angles. This means it lies at the intersection of two different schemes for classifying quadrilaterals: one that restricts it by the angles, and another that restricts it by the length of its sides. ARGHHHHH!

An example of a statement and its converse.

All of which brings us to these problems of logical thinking having to do with syllogism and bi-conditional logic. One statement would read like this: “all rhombi are parallelograms,” which is true. Its converse, “all parallelograms are rhombi” is not true, for obvious reasons – a parallelogram could also be a rectangle (which could also be a square) or it could be just a plain old parallelogram without right angles, which we call…. a parallelogram. ARGHHHHHH!

Connecting rhombi to squares creates this statement:  “all squares are rhombi, but not all rhombi are squares.”  And what do we call the rhombus that is not a square? “A rhombus!” ARGHHHHHH!

Suffice it to say, all this is very confusing to adults as well as children (I once spent an hour with a supervisor explaining explaining the statement about rhombi and squares, including why we pluralize “rhombus” to “rhombi” instead of the must easier to remember “rhombuses.”) All of which is to say is this: what’s the hurry with introducing the word “rhombus” to children? Why not let them call it a diamond, which is an actual mathematical term? The reasoning behind what makes a rhombus a rhombus is very complicated and highly specific and completely inappropriate for a young child. Think of how much harder it will be if the only rhombus a child has encountered is the blue pattern block? Sure, you can give a long-winded explanation of how the English geometric vocabulary is very complicated and illogical, but why bother? At this age, shouldn’t children be solving puzzles and moving shapes around, instead of learning complicated and irrelevant vocabulary?