Saturday, November 1, 2014

Bubblemania!

What do the following 12 bubble charts all have in common? Burst that bubble and maybe D181 will stand a chance of righting its sinking curriculum ship.

















15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bravo bloggers for presenting this information! It is time for all of your readers to remember the educational social justice advocates and policies that got us into this mess. The common (unethical? self-serving? full of conflicts of interest?)thread of course is obvious - Kurt Schneider. We can only hope that Dr. White sees this.

Anonymous said...

The curriculum department needs to take an antacid so we can all sing "pop pop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is."

Anonymous said...

Yes! And since the department of learning loves bubbles so much, how about buying some "Scrubbing Bubbles" and scrubbing the heck out of itself?

Anonymous said...

I showed the charts to my second grader. I told him one of the things in each chart is just like the others and it took him less than 5 minutes to find it. Children are so smart. Why can't Dr. White be?

Anonymous said...

This is really disturbing. Talk about following a map down the yellow brick road. Anyone with half a brain can see that we have all been led down the garden path by an extremely sly administrator who has managed to co-opt the district for his own advancement. Is White blind?

Anonymous said...

Well-The bloggers, and very informed, concerned parents have posted, written the BOE, voiced their disapproval (many with data to support claims) of this inexperienced, self-serving Learning Dept.


White can turn this around -Will he?

We are expecting leadership-I'm hoping Mr. Walsh stands up to some of this craziness.

Anonymous said...

It is clear that "someone" wants a job in the national spotlight. Does anyone know of a job vacancy in Washington D.C. that we can send "someone's" resume to?

Anonymous said...

This infuriates me. How can Dr. White not realize what is going on? How could he promote Schneider?

Anonymous said...

Dr. White has obviously drunk the koolaid. If he chooses to ignore the bubblemania and charge ahead we need to decide if this is the right leader. If we've had 20-30 administrative turnovers, two or three more isn't going to make a difference. That's a lame excuse if I ever saw one. So no one should be promoted within the district and no one should aspire to move up in another district. It just shows how all of these people are using our district and resources to further their careers and not look out for our students since the teachers and we will.

Anonymous said...

Interesting blog comments mentioning Jo Boaler at:
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/09/11/james-milgram-on-the-common-core-math-standards/

Scroll towards the end of the comments.

Anonymous said...

Check this out.

http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-core-curriculum-standards-in-math/

Anonymous said...

and this one:

http://hoosiersagainstcommoncore.com/james-milgram-testimony-to-the-indiana-senate-committee/

we are all in trouble....

Anonymous said...

White's big mistake was supporting L4A within the first few weeks of his employment without analyzing data and results first. This will haunt him as time progresses. He may not be the best person to lead us out of a mess he's helping to continue.

jay_wick said...

I suspect the cryptic reference above to something on the Ravitch blog is this : "in the long run, the schools that adopted Boaler’s methods had such dismal results that they dropped her program to go back to the traditional methods."

As I said when I addressed the BOE after the little video interlude, it is embarrassing when I, as someone that has not been involved in the day-to-day of education for more than 15 years can find all manner of references to controversies that directly contradict the material the district staff uses to support their position. I really don't want to make staff look incompetent. I simply wish they did their jobs better. While I knew of the objections of Dr. Milgram, the Stanford Math Professor that would not sign off on the Common Core panel he served on, I had never seen that Boaler video until it was on screen. What I did that night, with nothing more than my cell phone, was find the gory details of counter accusations. I told the assembled BOE members and district staff to check out the widely different opinion on the validity of Dr. Boaler's findings from Railside and not expect parents to accept this single very photogenic professor as the only authority. There are far more convincing studies that should have been referenced.
Sadly the pattern of particular district staff calling for reliance on feel good emotion over hard data has gone on too long. The results are almost certainly reflected in the tumble our district has taken in the ISAT standings and the lack of growth in MAP tests especially among our most capable students.

Frankly I don't care a whole lot about kids in earlier grades spending more time with manipulatives. There are lots of good reasons to support exploratory learning. Most of the data shows solid gains in the early years. I also have little reason to believe that any competent teacher would really stick to something that harms kids' general level of understanding regarding any important topics in mathematics. That said, the universal conclusions of not just national panels but even invited "experts" that have visited our classrooms is that some teachers would benefit from deeper knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy.

What do I object to the extreme lack of honesty in addressing the glaring mismatch between what is plainly obvious in the declining success of our district on the NEW standardized tests that are allegedly aligned to the content of Common Core AND the response of our district staff.

If we are to believe the promoters of Common Core, that content does not dictate any particular methodology, while district staff is promoting advocates of not just constructivist methodology but a whole weird touchy-feely approach about how math is taught even when there is ample disagreement as to the conclusions / evidence of those that promote such methods. The conclusions from Railside (which admittedly was with high schoolers, but many of our 7th or 8th graders take Algebra, which was allegedly the subject Boaler targeted...) show that Dr. Boaler's methods were so ineffective that they had to be abandoned. If staff cannot check this ahead of time then how are we to believe ANYTHING that district staff presents?

These clear contradictions should not be tolerated by the BOE! Even more infuriating was the self-serving nonsense about staff turn-over and lack of time for teacher training. Perhaps if certain members of the district staff had performed the duties delegated to them the former superintendent could have tended to ill relative and still seen the district make progress.
If district staff would follow through on the items that were allegedly agreed to in the recently negotiated labor agreement perhaps they could have designed training consistent with that agreement!

The BOE has to lay out VERY CLEAR policies and standards of performance and be sure the era of excuses ends.

The Parents said...

Well said Wick. Here's our opinion. Your suggestion that "the BOE has to lay out VERY CLEAR policies and standards of performance and be sure the era of excuses ends" is great. It will probably not happen? Why, because the BOE will look to the administration to create the VERY CLEAR policies and standards of performance and look to Dr. White to "be sure the era of excuses end." The first part will never happen with the inexperienced, unproven curriculum administrators who are learning on the job, not using their well honed expertise, gleaned from years of curriculum department experience they should have brought to D181 from their former districts. Nope, these newbies are learning their trade on the backs of our students. The second part won't happen unless the BOE tells White he must hold his underlings accountable. So far, a majority of the BOE have been unwilling to do that. So we are sunk.