2008 July 10 Archive at The Core Knowledge Blog

When it comes to Math education, less is more says Virginia teacher Patrick Welsh in a USA Today opinion piece. Virginia’s Standards of Learning features 64-pages detailing “what math gurus in Richmond think kids should absorb at every step in their 13 years in school.” Still he notes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., where he teaches English, “we have been graduating hundreds of kids who need a calculator to figure out that nine times five is 45.”

One reason for the teacher frustration is that the state’s math gurus have de-emphasized memorization in favor of “conceptual thinking.” The same philosophy has crept into English classes, where “creativity” has been elevated over knowledge of grammar, and into history classes, where knowing historical trends — “the big picture” — has replaced knowing dates of important events. The result is seniors who are not just incapable of multiplication, but also unable to identify the verb in a sentence or come within 100 years of placing the Civil War.

“Kids also are taught the wrong material at the wrong time,” says Welsh, who counsels slowing down and giving kids the time and ability to master basics. “Students are not the only ones who must ‘get’ math. Many elementary school teachers are notoriously weak here.”

Related News: Every California eighth-grader will be tested in algebra — ready or not — under a policy approved Wednesday that could make the state the first in the nation to require an upper-level math class before high school, the L.A. Times reports.

The New York Sun this morning reveals that NYC’s Department of Education has created a “truth squad” deploying its press office staffers to read education Web logs and Web sites “in a hunt for factual errors and misinformation.” Sol Stern, Eduwonkette, Fordham’s Gadfly and A-Rus are among those on the DOE required reading list. Stern describes the practice as Orwellian.

I love a good controversy as much as anyone, but for better or for worse, this seems much ado about nothing. This, simply put, is what PR people do. It’s like getting upset at teachers for writing lesson plans. You could certainly raise questions about how government press offices have morphed from putative public information officers to functioning overtly as political operatives and image makers, and whether that’s a legitimate use of public dollars, but that’s been going on for a very long time now from the White House on down. If you have PR people on the public payroll, they’re going to do what PR people do–advocate aggressively for the programs, policies and people they serve.