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Weekly Math UpdatesJuly 12, 2006 Contents:
Hi all, There will not be an email update next week but in exchange for a week off I need you to help out with a couple things below. Orem City Petition -URGENT We need everyone to pitch in and help get a couple thousand people signed up by August 1st on the petition site for Orem's break off. Please contact anyone you know living in Orem and point them to the website below. You can also call people in Orem and fill out the online petition form right over the phone with their permission. This petition is not to break away from ASD, but merely to get the measure put on the ballot in November so the citizens can vote on the issue. http://www.oremschooldistrict.org Here is the actual petition statement:
If you have paper petitions, please go to the website and type all the names in as soon as possible. If you don't live in Orem and don't realize what a huge difference this will make to change things all over the state but especially in the North end of ASD, there is nothing you can do at this time more important than helping get Orem residents to sign the petition. Campaign Help There are a couple of candidates running for school board that I've previously mentioned and they need help. If you have run a campaign before, please contact me asap. We will also need donations in the near future to help fund their campaigns and get them onto the board. Fixing a system-Increasing pay to teachers Everyone knows teachers want more pay, right? I mean that's a given. You can't discuss education without someone beating you over the head with "teachers are underpaid," or "they deserve more for what they do," or "there's nothing more precious than our children's education." OK, I get that, but there's at least two issues that have to be overcome for this to happen. One, it's time for teacher's to be intellectually honest about what works and what doesn't work (I'm mostly talking math here but there have been experiments in the past right here in ASD and elsewhere that had our guinea pig children learning spelling and other subjects by similarly poor programs. (and for those of you already in this "honesty" camp and recognize constructivism as a failed methodology for basing a curriculum around, congratulations and don't start flaming me--I'm glad you're there). If you want parents to respect you teachers more, stop blowing in the wind and get grounded in the facts of effective education and what it is not. Then once you "get it," open your mouths and start convincing others!!! This document is practically all you need. (http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/carnine.pdf) Two, people like efficiency. "Educational efficiency" is right up there with "military intelligence" and "liberty jail" for top oxymoron honors. Bureaucratic layers in the school districts are a barrier, not a bypass to better education for our children. We should seriously be looking at eliminating 90%+ of district functions and having schools run with a community counsel much like charter schools do and then pass the savings on to teachers for increased salaries. In exchange for a nice bump in pay, teachers would lose tenure and principals would be held accountable to the community council just like a district superintendent is accountable to the school board. Then if the council doesn't like the direction the school is heading they can replace the principal. If the principal has problems with a teacher that isn't teaching or goofs up, there's no tenure holding that person in the position. This solves the "experimentation" problem at the district level and schools could just pick from a number of top-notch curriculum and implement it without all the political wrangling. Schools could watch each other to see what really works and make adjustments as desired. Teaching kids isn't just an art, it's a science where things work or they don't work. Lets use what really works and stop funding experiments outside of science classes. For all other non-education district issues like busing kids, lets privatize them and let a 3rd party worry about upkeep and maintenance and just contract with the schools for busing the kids. Linda Moran's Sites Linda Moran is a homeschooler blogger with a couple nice sites pointing out constructivist fallacies. Here's a nice clip from one page of her site:
On another page, she has a lot of good quotes. Here's one from Wilfried Schmid at Harvard:
I would add it is also very damaging to students who don't "get" math because now they're guaranteed to never get a solid framework to base their other learning on. Media School districts continue to grow; charters make impact by Anna Chang-Yen Utah County children get space experience by Natalie Evans (one of the better things available to kids--a Star Trek simulator--LONG LIVE STAR TREK----or maybe that should be live long....) Utah's school districts: Is Smaller Better? (SL Tribune) Clip: "When you give parents a meaningful voice in the education of their children, their interest level automatically increases," he said. "They know where their children go to school is going to be controlled locally by them." Weekly Comic Archive: http://www.oaknorton.com/weaponsofmathdestruction.cfm Till next week, Oak Norton |
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