Posted on 05/17/2015 1:58:28 PM PDT by PROCON
Caleb Stewart Rossiter, a college professor and policy analyst, decided to try teaching math in the D.C. schools. He was given a pre-calculus class with 38 seniors at H.D. Woodson High School. When he discovered that half of them could not handle even second-grade problems, he sought out the teachers who had awarded the passing grades of D in Algebra II, a course that they needed to take his high-level class.
There are many bewildering stories like this in Rossiter’s new book, “Ain’t Nobody Be Learnin’ Nothin’: The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools,” the best account of public education in the nation’s capital I have ever read. It will take me three columns to do justice to his revelations about what is being done to the District’s most distracted and least productive students.
Teachers will tell you it is a no-no to ask other teachers why they committed grading malpractice. Rossiter didn’t care. Three of the five teachers he sought had left the high-turnover D.C. system, but the two he found were so candid I still can’t get their words out of my mind.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Also, abolishing the Department of Education and returning control to the states, (as originally intended), would greatly improve quality of education.
And of course involved parents would be nice.
Fantasyland report cards will continue until major changes occur.
ARTH ping.
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Math be rassist. Grades be rassist too.
I'd like to see Separation of School and State. It should be a flat rule: tax money cannot be used to education children.
Families should take it as a personal responsibility to make sure their children are educated. Do it yourself. Pay someone to do it. Join a Home Schooling Association -- whatever.
But the government-run schools, and the Teachers Unions, should be basically illegal. Separation of School and State.
My sister experiences this teaching middle school math at a special residential school for black kids in Baltimore. She is an amazing teacher and gets results. She’s not afraid to give failing grades when the kids are skating by with excellent grades in English, social studies, and science even though their proficiency in those classes is abysmal.mill have to send her this book as a gift. Thanks for posting.
Rossiterm is a pedigreed liberal, but he’s done some good things such as publishing an an oped in the WSJ expressing doubt about man made global warming and how that keeps poor Africans poor. He was fired from the progressive Institute for Policy Studies think tank after his essay was printed.
I went to grade school a few years with Rossiter and we were friends for a while in Ithaca. His dad committed suicide at their home in 1970 and Caleb found him.
We had one man who took on the educational establishment when he self-published a traditionally-based algebra textbook in 1981. He had seen a similar situation of woefully low performance with his community college students in 1970 as a new algebra teacher after retiring from the military. His foray into the private halls of academic "authors" caused hateful attacks on his efforts to teach math to the child who had come from weak parenting and weak teaching. As a decorated bomber pilot, the warrior fought back hard. Their effort to destroy him exists even today, 19 years after his death. His name was John Saxon and he managed to build a K-12 math textbook publishing business worth an estimated $100 million. He kept declaring that "Results matter!" His opponents declared in return, "Equity matters!" Evidently, their goal of equity is being fulfilled today with fake grades being given to assure equity for all.
SAXON math ROCKS.
All three of mine used it, all got into their respective private universities in the honors programs, and all three were eligible to take Calculus right from the start, with no remedial math required.
People like to talk about graduation rates.
What’s really important is the LITERACY rates, and THOSE are abysmal.
They just clutter classrooms and distract serious students.
A lot of native-born Americans cannot communicate in their own native language in either spoken or written formats.
And if you tell them so, they may well attack you physically for your racist attitude.
I will never understand many freepers axiomatic belief that state control will automatically produce better results.
It certainly has that potential, and I support a return to federalism for other reasons, but states can screw up as bad or worse than the feds.
IOW, if full control were returned to states, some (most?) would improve, but it is almost certain some would get worse.
With 50 states you'd get a wide range.
I graduated HS in the early 80s. I was horrible at algebra. My brain simply does not ‘get’ algebra. I grasp the concepts of geometry with no difficulty at all but Algebra baffles me. In 10th grafe I got a 37 on the final. In 1th grade retaking the course I got a 40 on the final. My teacher stood there in a flowing robe and said “You shall not PASS!”
In 12th I aced what the school called Business math.
Was it really that long ago that schools held people to a standard? I guess it was.
Agreed. How can we have the government educate children without the risk (or more likely the certainty) that those children will be taught that government is to be viewed as ever-benign rather than a semi-necessary evil, that anyone who tells others what to do is assumed to be more knowledgeable than the people who actually engage in the productive endeavor? That you’re always assumed to be noble when you’re meddling in the lives of others, backed by the threat of force, while minding your own business and dealing with others on a purely voluntary basis earns you the assumption of selfishness if not lack of integrity?
No money for education and parents should be charged with child abuse if they do not educate their children.
At least with state control the residents get a vote on who educates their kids.
With the Department of Education, faceless, nameless bureaucrats show up from 9-5 and could care less about the kids.
I’ll see you fell asleep in typing class too. :-)
If you were proficient with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals when you walked into Algebra I. . . and you applied yourself, it meant you had a cr@p teacher.
I had two liberal arts teachers in High School that did the same to me as was done to you in math.
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