Common Core Graduates Are The Worst Prepared For College

By Professor Doom


     I feel like plucking some low-hanging fruit today, and so let's take a look at Common Core. I've written of it before, how it ignores science, how it's just another excuse to inject more indoctrination into our schools, and how by changing the approach to how mathematics is learned, will further separate the children from their parents, since the latter won't have a clue how to help their kids with homework using the convoluted new methods.

     Predicting the failure of Common Core is about as easy as predicting Epstein's "suicide" in prison, but now we get to see how well the "new ways of knowing" methods of Common Core are working, but it's now been 4 years since this idiotic idea was proposed--enough time for a kid go through all of high school, using Common Core as preparation for college.

      My own eyeballs tell me something's gone wrong. Even though the endless cancer treatments make it impossible for me to teach a real class, I still do much free tutoring for the department. The advanced students fresh out of high school can no longer handle fractions unless they have a calculator to do it for them, and the non-advanced students can't handle fractions even with a calculator. This is just one example of how Common Core has gone a full step lower--before Common Core, the advanced students could add fractions without $50 of electronics to help, for example. And of course, as soon as a kind of fraction pops up which the calculator can't handle, it's mental lockdown time for the students. Even arithmetic like "15 divided by 5" has the "A" students needing a calculator now.

     But that's my own eyeballs. How about something less anecdotal?

First Common Core High School Grads Worst-Prepared For College In 15 Years


      I remind the gentle reader that the whole reason Common Core was slammed down the throats of our kids was because it was going to help them prepare for college, the ultimate goal (or so we're told repeatedly) of our public school system.

Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.


     While the above might lead the casual reader to think that things were way better 15 years ago, there's a factor here which causes confusion: how well a student is prepared is determined by "standardized" tests. Every decade or so, the standards on those tests are lowered, or at least dramatically changed. Anyone who compares tests of today to tests of, say, a century ago can quickly see something has gone horribly wrong in our education system, as it's very clear the capabilities of our young humans have dropped off very sharply--top students of today would horribly the older tests.

      And so comparing student performance on tests of today to even a mere 15 years ago just isn't an "apples to apples" comparison. Still, just looking at the last few years of steady drops tells the tale. The people pushing Common Core needn't worry much, as I'm sure those standardized tests will change soon, so that Common Core will look better.

       The gentle reader's grandchildren, assuming they'll even be capable of reading, will absolutely marvel at material that kids today could do, but I digress.

“Students in the U.S. made significant progress in math and reading achievement on NAEP from 1990 until 2015, when the first major dip in achievement scores occurred,” reported U.S. News and World Report. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2015 is the year states were required by the Obama administration to have fully phased in Common Core.


            I can't answer in detail about the NAEP test, but much like with Epstein's "suicide," I predict with confidence that it'll be changed soon and scores will start heading up again.

As Common Core was moving into schools, 69 percent of school principals said they also thought it would improve student achievement. All of these “experts” were wrong, wrong, wrong.


      The article lists many of those experts, but much like with the principals listed above, none of the "experts" actually teach human beings. All the experts who teach human beings (which strike me as the ones you should ask about matters involving teaching human beings) that I'm aware of, including myself,  determined Common Core would fail, and it's not difficult to specifically identify why (as I discussed in four connected posts).

        It's so weird how the people accept lies being poured into their ears, even when those lies harm their children. Granted, I shouldn't throw stones, considering how many lies of cancer doctors I've accepted.

On the same day the NAEP results were released, the college testing organization ACT released a report showing that the high school class of 2019’s college preparedness in English and math is at seniors’ lowest levels in 15 years. These students are the first to have completed all four high school years under Common Core.


     Looks like they'll have to change the ACT, too. I should point out, it isn't just high school where we're seeing disaster, it's throughout the system. Again, no surprise, and I again remind we were promised that Common Core would really improve things.

“Readiness levels in English, reading, math, and science have all decreased since 2015, with English and math seeing the largest decline,” the report noted. Student achievement declined on ACT’s measures among U.S. students of all races except for Asian-Americans, whose achievement increased.


      It's an interesting result about the Asians, but I suspect there's a reason for this. Recall that one of the main goals for Common Core was to make it impossible, or at least very difficult, for the parents to help their children. Without this help, children will struggle. But the Asians? Children of new immigrants especially have been unable to go to their parents for help, because the parents came from a radically different system already. So their scores weren't going to be as negatively impacted as the "non Asian" students, and the improvement isn't all that much, really.

It is thus still the case, as it was when the Coleman Report was released 53 years ago, that U.S. public schools do not lift children above the conditions of their home lives.


      I cite the above to again reinforce the point: if the children can't get help from their parents, they will not get help from the schools. We've known this for at least half a century, and still our government works tirelessly to separate the kids from parents at every opportunity.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Professor: Grading and Grammar Are Racist

By Professor Doom

     Our institutions of higher learning are massively oversized. While in general I disagree with the levels of growth which allowed this to happen there is one benefit to a large institution: resistance to change. Back when our institutions were merely huge, this benefit occurred quite often as the universities tended to not fall into fad “learning” scams like “new math” or “common core” or whatever, but somehow along the way to achieving truly immense size the institutional resistance to change vanished.

       The reason for this, of course, relates to the student loan scam, which made size, and not education, relevant to a school’s status. This led to the worst sorts of people getting control of our universities, and these kind of people, edu-fascists, concentrated power. Just as the Emperors of Rome could single-handedly achieve broad changes in society with an edict, so too can a university Poo-Bah dramatically change the character of an institution.

       The concept of “best practices” allows other Poo-Bahs to follow suit, and quickly, and so whenever some institution changes its rules to cause even further growth beyond all reason, the other “leaders” quickly follow to do the same.

      This growth has been achieved by allowing a great number of people to come on campus who have little interest in learning, and are merely there to collect their share of student loan money (after the university takes quite a bit more than lion’s share, of course). Trouble is, these students do tend to fail classes, and do tend to drop out after so many failures. In the last few decades, the rules have long since been changed so that failing doesn’t occur quite so much, and that dropouts due to failure are likewise less common than before.

      But, we still have students failing and dropping out. Whatever shall we do? Cry RACISM, of course:

Professor says grading, good grammar are examples of white supremacy

     The professor referenced above, I covered before at American University. It’s the same spiel as always:

‘Grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools’

      Before going further, I must highlight how incredibly stupid the above is, and give the reader fair time to laugh. Please, gentle readers, call friends and family members over to whatever device you use to read this, and call their attention to the above quote. They deserve a good laugh as well.

      Now that this lunatic professor has infected American University with this madness, he’s travelling the country spreading it to other schools, with Ball State University next.  He gives his speech there, hosted by the Office of Inclusive Excellence (I can’t make these names up, and our schools are bloated with such goofy-named fiefdoms).

       When I was at a corrupt community college, every semester we had people coming in telling us basically the same thing as this professor, at least in terms of results: don’t fail students. The only difference is this guy’s rhetoric plays the race card more often than the Kentucky Derby:

We are all implicated in white supremacy,” Inoue said during his presentation…“This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,” he said.
“This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”


     If I was in China, taking a course in Mandarin, I would fully expect the teacher of that course to grade my use of Mandarin. It wouldn’t occur to me that this would be “supremacist,” I would expect a “monolingual” standard for a country. Yes, I know China has many native languages, but despite this reality it still mandates “one language” that all educated people there must know. Bottom line, mandating a proper use of a single language isn’t “white supremacist,” it’s a matter of nationalism, and our planet has seen endless countries arrange themselves linguistic lines far more than along physical characteristics.

     There is absolutely no winning with these people, who are never satisfied:

“Your school can be racist and produce racist outcomes,” Inoue said. “Even with expressed values and commitments to anti-racism and social justice.”

      It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re still vulnerable to the RACIST charge. This suits both sides of the edu-fascist cabals running our schools: admin is happy to add yet another fiefdom to rule over, and the ideologues are thrilled to be ever in pursuit of ever louder virtue signaling.

During his presentation at Ball State University, Inoue said that in order to succeed in even the most liberal and forward-thinking institutions of higher education today, a person of color has to act, think and sound white to some degree.

     Rubbish. Honest, there are universities in China where “sounding white” will not help you at all, and in many institutions in Africa, sounding white could easily be a detriment.

      Ultimately, it comes down to one selling point:

      …writing teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.”

      The above is the primary reason this professor gets so much traction with his ideas. He’s advocating for course grades not to be about quality or knowledge, but simply a claim of effort. Much as admin continuously brought in educationists to “suggest” I allow more cheating in my classes (because that keeps more students on campus and provides admin with bigger checks), the professor’s above advice is given for different reasons to be sure, but is promoted for the same reason as other educationists.

       While the educationists pumping this crud decades ago could only have a low impact on schools with tenured faculty who weren’t going to change their ways, the classes of today are largely taught by de-professionalized faculty who have no choice but to follow the Poo-Bah’s whims or be dismissed.

        And so I assure the gentle reader that Ball State will become converged and achieve educational irrelevance in short order as this professor’s ideas are followed. The only question which remains is what school will be destroyed next?

       The comments section is filled with people who rightfully laugh with scorn at the professor’s racist ideas, but they’re not the edu-fascists running the schools, alas.

      The double-lung surgery failed, and finding that out was delayed a few weeks because they ignored my reminder to do a tumor marker test.  MDA's biopsy shows I have a met to my femur. So, next thing is surgery. They told me to wait for the call from the surgeon's office for set up the meeting to get the go-ahead for the surgery appointment.
   
       It's been a week waiting for that phone call. MDA in Houston is the #1 cancer treatment center, and one thing I can say from this ordeal: the #2 cancer treatment place must be absolutely wretched.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

                                           

SAT To Measure Whiteness…Seriously?

By Professor Doom




     The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is a test which measures, at the risk of being patronizing, scholastic aptitude. For those very few colleges which still care about admissions, the SAT is often used to determine which students have the aptitude to survive a legitimate college program.


     No, it’s not a perfect test by any means, but with the massive cheating and grade inflation going in our public school system, it’s a useful tool, a weak but objective measure of how well the student is suited to study.


     Objective tools get in the way of power and wealth accumulation, and must be destroyed:


The SAT will assign a new score that factors in where you live and the crime level in your neighborhood



     Um…no? The whole point of the test is to measure the student, not the neighborhood the student comes from—or perhaps where the student claims to come from. The possibility there for “racing to the bottom” in student origin shouldn’t be overlooked, as it’ll be much easier to claim to be in a bad neighborhood than to study hard for months, after all.


       Why should “where you live?” and “crime level” be on the test? I mean, if you have that information already, just make it another part of admissions. As I pointed out above, the test is called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, not the Stupid Adversity Test…but the latter is what it will be now.


       How did this madness even get remotely on the table? Why aren’t campuses completely outraged at this debasement of a test which has worked well enough for decades?


      It’s easy enough to explain. Our campuses basically operate on the principle of edu-fascism, the merger of administrative and ideological interests. The administrative caste only wants growth, and anything which will allow a workaround of admissions restrictions is approved of by them. The ideological interests, of course, are fascinated with virtue-signaling.


       And so they both applaud their cooperation with this horrible evil thing they are doing. Evil? Yes, evil. Let me count the ways:


       First, this is evil because it’s hurting kids. The kids who get on campus because of a murder on their block instead of study are going to get creamed when they walk into a college course on a legitimate campus, and probably drop out after a semester or two of being some place where they shouldn’t be. Just as a lightweight boxer has no business going into the ring with a heavyweight but can have a fine career within their weight class, these kids would probably do much better on a campus more suited to their needs. Why do that to them? If the edu-fascists cared about the kids, they wouldn’t encourage this at all.


       Second, this is evil because it’s putting the kids into debt slavery. They won’t simply leave college after wasting a year of their lives, they’ll leave with $10,000 or so of inescapable debt, possibly much more. It’s evil and cruel to do this to them…but edu-fascists don’t care.


      Third, this is evil because it hurts the actually apt students on campus. The slow students will absolutely slow the class down…why should these innocent students who actually studied to come on campus be penalized? It’s evil to punish the innocent like this.


      Fourth, this is evil because it harms the alumni. The influx of unqualified students will invariably lead to a reduction in standards, in turn leading to a reduction in value of the degrees the alumni earned when the SAT was legitimate. Again, punishing the innocent is evil.


      I could go on with discussing how this affects the faculty, who will see their tireless work of preserving the schools against the plundering edu-fascists undermined at the core level by the SAT, or how this affects the parents who worked hard to get their kids to study, or how this cheats the people who made donations to what they thought was a legit school, or how this cheats all the kids who studied hard to do well on the SAT…you get the idea, any honest look at this change to the SAT would lead to condemnation as quintessential evil, but there will be none of that from the edu-fascists, who only care about money and power, or power and money, depending on whether we’re talking about admin or ideologues.


“…comes amid heightened scrutiny that colleges are facing over the admissions process and the diversity of their student bodies….”



     The most relevant scrutiny is how the admissions process is corrupted; the change to the SAT will simply allow for greater corruption. How incompetent must our leaders be to respond to corruption by adding to the corruption?


       “Diversity” is not a concern, and never should be at a university, which was built to support education and research. That said, Diversity as a goal could be justified if there was some research indicating Diversity somehow helped to achieve those goals. Seeing as, so far, every change to university policies to “increase diversity” has caused the institutions to further turn away from their explicit goals, I doubt such research will ever be produced.


       Nobody in control cares if there’s no evidence supporting it, and common sense destroys it, as more Diversity allows more student loan money to flow into edu-fascists pockets, so it always must be improved.

Students are scored on a scale of 1 to 100 based on data from records like the US census and the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the College Board, a score of 50 would be considered average, while a number above 50 indicates more hardship. 

The score takes into account information from the student's background, but it does not include race. 

     Au contraire! This will have everything to do with race. I promise the gentle reader, if this change becomes fully accepted, whites will assuredly score lower on this scale. White privilege, you see, so a white growing up in a crime-ridden neighborhood will still not endure as much hardship as a non-white (by this I mean not Asian as well, they’ll also get penalized for their ethnicity) in the same neighborhood.

      Nobody is stupid enough to believe that last line, and the people pushing it know it. If race isn’t a factor, how could this change possibly help Diversity? And thus I casually destroy the claim that the change isn’t about race.

Colleges will be able to see the number when considering applicants, but students themselves won't be told their scores.

     I reiterate that this change will increase the corruption in admissions, not reduce it. Why else would they make this new fudge-factor number secret?


      Asian students are upset because it’s become painfully obvious they’ve been discriminated against, to the point that they need higher test scores than “non-Asians” to get into top schools. The associated lawsuits are likely to work because those test scores are known by the Asians, proving their case. 


      This new system will allow for secret discrimination. Good luck with a lawsuit, now.

Jeremiah Quinlan, the school's dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Wall Street Journal that Yale has nearly doubled the number of low-income students and those who are first in their families to attend college to about 20% of new students.

"This (adversity score) is literally affecting every application we look at," Quinlan told the Journal. "It has been a part of the success story to help diversify our freshman class."

--the gentle reader should note how the admin’s title is very nearly twice as long as his name, and thus he should be fired immediately as per my guidelines for reducing excess administrators on our campuses. Yes, that guideline is capricious and I further capriciously applied it, but seeing as these people advocate for capricious admissions guidelines, it’s certainly fair.

Note carefully how “…help diversify our…class” once again simply assumes such diversification is a good thing, will help Harvard to better reach its goals of education and research by destroying them. Again I ask for a study showing that making the SAT bogus is going to help. 

I should also point out that tests like the SAT have been testing on strange things, the better to represent the indoctrination going on in our public school system. I don't comment much on what's going on in our public schools, so I'll let a friend describe it:

History is written by the victors...and the "victors" in academia are the SJWs...and thus, the new version of "history" will be their own.

….Last month, a buddy's high school daughter was panicking about her upcoming AP History exam….My buddy is upset because he's flipped through her book and its full of "modern" biases, coy wordings and outright inaccuracies. It isn't a high school history text. It's an indoctrination manual. But here's the rub. In order for his daughter to excel in her AP class, she must memorize these "new truths" and regurgitate them back to her SJW teachers and on her AP exam.

…If you love history or literature, you should covet the old texts while they still exist…

---"Robert, an ex-teacher in California, 10 years in special education"





     Just as in the 2016, the Left controlled the media, the schools, the internet, and social media, and still couldn’t win the election, leading to the massive “Trump-Russia hoax” and general mass insanity rather than just face the reality of a lost election, we’re seeing the same thing in our schools. 


      Despite the warping of “history,” the debasement of education in our schools to the point that our typical high school graduates read at the 7^th grade level…they can’t accept the reality that not all people do all things with all the same ability. Rather than face reality, they’ll insert insanity into the SAT. What will happen here is what has happened with everything else they touch: it gets destroyed as people walk away. The SAT was the premier college entrance exam, but I strongly suspect that will not be the case in just a few years.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com











     

The Racial Lens Blocks Vision

By Professor Doom

 

    Angry student: “Why do I have to learn algebra? I’m only going to be teaching eight year olds!”

    Me: “Because the parents of eight year olds want their teachers to know more than an eight year old.”

--I used to get Education majors quite often in my math courses, before they became cloistered into special “Math for Education Majors” courses. I heard complaints similar to the above many, many times.

  

      As I sit recovering from yet another crushing surgery (13 new surgical scars since last September, if anyone's counting), a reader sent me an article from 2005. So, it’s dated, but highlights how looking at everything through a racist perspective makes it impossible to see the truth. The author of the articles certainly notes the problems I've identified time and again…but perpetually misses the issue:

Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics ----Patricia Clark Kenschaft

      I can’t believe I’m actually saying an article with “Racial Equity” in the title actually has many good observations in it…but it does. Offsetting my shame is how the author doesn’t realize the value of what she sees. Let’s get started.

      So the author asks black people with degrees in mathematics what can be done to fix the “under-representation” (citation needed by the article, none given) of blacks in mathematics, and one answer comes back strongly:

“Teach mathematics better to all American children. The way it is now, if children don’t learn mathematics at home, they don’t learn it at all, so any ethnic group that is underrepresented in mathematics will remain so until children are taught mathematics better in elementary school.”

     The author is a math teacher herself, and understands the above to mean that children aren’t being taught mathematics well in elementary school. Being in math, and not in Education, she addresses the problem in the obvious way: going to the elementary schools and seeing with her own eyes. She spoke to actual elementary school teachers:

I have found them eager and quick to learn—and appallingly ignorant of the most basic mathematics.

      Appallingly ignorant. Gosh, that’s a clear observation. Why couldn’t the author ask how it was so that the teachers were appallingly ignorant of what they were supposedly teaching children? The teachers had real college degrees, after all, in Education.    

     One study of nine hundred Texas school districts revealed that the large disparities in achievement between black and white students were almost entirely accounted for by socioeconomic status and differences in the measurable qualifications of their teachers.

      Yes, the qualifications of those teachers. Namely, teachers with Education degrees are suspect (there can be some good ones, though), while teachers with degrees in actual subject matter are far less so (there are some bad ones, of course). It’s a shame the author didn’t narrow down the qualifications along obvious lines, and instead chose to be blinded by racial concerns.

       Now, teachers aren’t hired racially (bear with me), so where is the racial inequality coming from? The author smashes her toe into it, and limps on without being curious why she was limping:

It has been my observation that the reason that scores are higher in white districts is that some parents teach their children mathematics at home, and these children teach many of the others. It has appeared to me that the teachers are no better prepared in the high-scoring districts.

      So, the “white districts” have the same fake Educationist teachers as elsewhere, but the parents who knew what was going on, at least before Common Core, could go around the teachers and just teach the material to their own kids, and the kids who weren’t lucky enough to have such parents could learn from friends who did. Common Core, by utterly warping how mathematics is taught, will destroy this option for parents (by design?).

       But the issue here isn’t the racial inequality, it’s that there was a way around the terrible Education teachers. She demonstrates just how little these teachers know by quizzing them:

…I asked the question again. “What is the area of a rectangle that is x by y?”

The teachers were very friendly people, and they know how frustrating it can be when no student answers a question. “x plus y?” said two in the front simultaneously. “What?!!!” I said, horrified. Then all fifty of them shouted together, “x plus y.”

--I have a similar anecdote. Even if I didn’t, the above rings very true for me, as I had some friends, one a valedictorian high school graduate, call me to ask their “math expert” friend about the area of a rectangular piece of real estate they were looking at…they weren’t sure how to do it, but knew the length and width, figuring (rightly) it would be helpful information.

      Time and again she sees with her own eyes why the students aren’t learning math: the teachers don’t know any math. And time and again she ties it to racism.

Educationist: “We’re offering a new math course, taking out the math they don’t need, like squares and rectangles.”

--I’m serious, the course was proposed and offered.

      It’s the ignorance, honest. So ask the dang question already: how are these people who are ignorant becoming qualified to become teachers?

     The author does the right thing again, however, and verifies herself that the kids can learn, by doing the teaching herself.

Its principal invited me to consider that school “my school”. He and the teachers really wanted to help the students. Its students had a median achievement in mathematics of about the 25th percentile on the “Iowas”, one of the lowest levels in Newark. I am now convinced that its rank was due to the fact that the principal did not pressure the teachers to cheat in any way on standardized tests. When I told him this years later, his eyes widened. He was president of the principals’ union. “What? You are saying…” I nodded. Since then I have read numerous reports of systemic cheating on standardized tests and other forms of deception by school administrators,….

--while not the focus of this article, I remind the gentle reader that the fraud going on in standardized testing in public schools is massive, and not restricted to Newark. There’s a reason why the bureaucrats want those standardized tests: they’re very easy to cheat on.

     Since she knows what she’s doing, she’s successful as a teacher. She teaches the kids subtraction…it only takes a few minutes, but they’d never been exposed to the concept at such a young age before, because the usual teacher was a bit shaky on the subject.

…half the children passed the subtraction part of the November standardized test—without any reinforcement from her. [The usual teacher] had never had a child pass it before. The crucial role of mathematical knowledge on the part of the teacher was becoming obvious to me…

      Obvious, yes, but then the author gets distracted yet again:

The children were all African American. The school is in one of the worst neighborhoods of our country’s poorest city. There were no greens growing within a block of the school…

      Yes, certainly, poverty and quality of life are issues but…it’s about the teachers, like the author just observed before looking through the racial lens, who must get college degrees to teach, and get those degrees not in an academic subject but instead in Education.

Admin: “Congratulations to the Education Department, for once again having the highest retention rates and highest GPAs on campus, as well as the greatest growth over all our departments.”

--I saw similar kudos and awards from admin many times when I was at a state university. Admin never thinks twice how their awards system really isn’t helping education. The growth, incidentally, was because every student flunking out in every other major was being herded into the “easy A” Education programs. I don’t want our students to fail but…should our teachers really be the weakest academics we can get?

       It isn’t simply that the teachers we’re putting in the schools are too weak to teach subtraction, even addition is a confusing topic for them:

“In 1999 U.S. cars achieved an average of 28.11 mpg, but light trucks were rated a mere 20.3 mpg. Their mileage was 23.8 mpg altogether. What proportion of American vehicles were light trucks in 1999?”

Answer by the teacher of your children: “‘Altogether’ means add, so the mileage altogether must be 48.41 miles per gallon.”

 I tried to explain but to no avail…

     Seriously, by tying the problem to racism, a huge issue is being overlooked: the children can’t possibly learn from these people. Skin color is irrelevant.

     Rather than focus on how Education departments, in the name of growth, have lowered standards and reduced requirements so that someone completely ignorant of math can teach children math, the author keeps going back to racism with a bit of virtue-signalling:

My own interest in elementary school mathematics education grew out of my equity concerns. Ever since my great-great-grandfather came north from a slave-holding family to fight on the Northern side of the Civil War, my family has been active in race relations…

        I grant that slavery indirectly forced black parents to rely on our flawed education system to learn what the white parents learned but…how about we stop talking about the Civil War and start identifying real problems with our critically flawed Education departments and, vastly more importantly, fixing them?

      I propose stopping with the failed Education degree idea. Start hiring teachers with actual subject knowledge, instead of, at best, the focus on ideology which an Education degree offers. Instead of this simple approach, the author, blinded by the lens of racism, proposes other actions instead:

1.    Structural Change: The mathematical communities need to collaborate with anyone else who will join the effort to lobby strenuously for the need for radically improved teacher knowledge. The major argument is that while once only a few people (white men?)…

     I’ll just stop at the suggestion of white men being the issue. Yes, we need radically improved teacher knowledge. We can do so easily in my one step solution.

2.    Individual Actions: Those who teach in institutions that certify elementary school teachers can work to make sure adequate specific courses are provided for them…

Um…those “adequate specific courses” are already provided in the math departments. Education departments got rid of them, replacing with ideology and “math for education majors” courses. Again, my one stop solution would not require individual action, just common sense.

3.    Remedial Work: Until the current cohort of elementary school teachers retire, the mathematical competence of today’s children will require that their teachers receive continual remedial programs.

Oh, no, not more remediation. That’s a disaster, too. I do concede that many of our current teachers are simply untrained (but absolutely degreed!), but having seen the immense failure of remediation in college, I just do not think we need to double down on failure.

Do the suggestions even stop here? No, the list…

is far from an exhaustive list of either people or activities; it merely indicates examples of good beginnings.

       Yes, we could do all that, and after a decade a more we’ll get nowhere. Alternatively, start hiring subject degree’d people to teach subjects, and watch as, which will be a surprise to Educationists, the kids actually learn the subject, instead of our current system where the teachers are only trained in Education, and thus so incompetent that generally the best a school can hope for is to commit fraud on the standardized tests.

     Anyone looking at today’s system can see how easy the solution is, just as this article, from over a decade ago, could have easily seen the problem and solution.

     Or could if it didn’t keep trying to tie racism into everything.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com