Dave Russell On Students First, Remediation, And Textbooks

(Very slightly edited for clarity--it was just a comment at SF's Facebook page)

Dave Russell

Yesterday I was at a training for a "Response to Intervention" program for fractions. The program was full of animation and audible dialog and multiple representations and was built using the latest research and pedagogy about how kids learn fractions. It is all the stuff that research and best practices/lesson study advocates for. Honestly, I was pretty impressed.

Thinking about it later, I couldn't help but feel defeated knowing that this excellent tool existed, but is only being sold for remediation purposes. The truth, as I see it, is that the program would make an excellent curriculum component. If all kids, especially the youngest learners for whom fractions are new were taught using the program, more kids would have a solid conceptual and procedural understanding of fractions. Instead, kids are exposed to dry factoid textbooks that historically prove to have little success at reaching kids.

If it were truly about the kids and not about the profit, the resources and clever teaching tools that are now reserved for the high profit world of remediation would be instead infused into the mainstream curricula.

Reform efforts need to address the built in ineptitude of the textbooks that are created by publishers who then turn around and offer highly effective remedial programs for a few hundred dollars per child.

I continue to attest that, by and large, the classroom teacher does the best they can with the tools they are given. The tools don't work but, surprisingly, the remediation product from the same publisher does. Teacher evaluation under these circumstances is dead wrong and continuing on this StudentFirst path of only holding teachers accountable without addressing the issue of lousy curriculum/effective remediation is scapegoating teachers for a situation they have no control over and likely cant win in.

Macmillan/McGraw: Self-Aware?

Someone at Macmillan/McGraw-Hill School Publishing Company has spent an hour and a half on my blog today, mostly checking out Everyday Math posts.

I guess they are worried they are being exposed as the useless pile of corporate greed they are!

Hey, McMac, stop publishing crap!

Update: I was checking out their site, and came upon this quote:

McGraw-Hill's Assessment & Instruction group is composed of two divisions – CTB/McGraw-Hill and The Grow Network/McGraw-Hill – which are focused on helping customers meet accountability requirements at all levels of education, and advancing learning through innovative assessment, reporting, and data-driven instruction linked to rigorous standards and teacher education.[emphasis mine]

They state their purpose as helping customers (school districts) meet accountability requirements (as opposed to creating materials that are good for kids).

Also notice the standards, teacher prep, and data-driven nomenclature used to give the illusion that they are in business to create excellent materials based on a wealth of science/research. They don't link to the science, because there is virtually none, and of the science/research that is out there, it is conflicted at best, and erroneous at worst.

Teaching is not rocket science. How could it be? Teaching is the art of making things exciting and interesting for kids so they can be motivated to open their minds to what is being presented. Simply presenting it is no substitute for presenting it well. Publishers remove any randomness, spontaneity, or originality from teachers by suggesting that their curricular materials, used as prescribed, will solve the problems of education, which, by the way, are not bad teachers or bad materials or even bad research; the problem with education is money (like the problem with just about everything), power, poverty, and corporate greed.

Kick out the corporate mindset. Lose the million dollar curricular contracts. Power back to the teachers and parents!!!!!