Bipartisan Education Reform – President Bush submitted his framework for education reform, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), three days after taking office and secured overwhelming bipartisan support less than a year later. NCLB represents the most significant overhaul of Federal education policy since 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed. NCLB creates strong standards in each state for what every child should know and learn in reading and math in grades 3-8 and holds schools accountable for closing the achievement gap between students of different socio-economic backgrounds.

High Standards and Accountability – Since President Bush signed NCLB into law, all states have developed a plan to ensure that every student becomes proficient at reading and math and that achievement gaps are closed between students of different socio-economic backgrounds. States, districts, and schools are using their unique accountability plans to measure the progress of student achievement, report student and school progress to parents, identify for improvement those schools not making adequate yearly progress, provide support for the improvement of schools and districts, and provide options – including public school choice and tutoring – for children in underperforming schools.

Historic Levels of Funding – President Bush’s overall Fiscal Year (FY) 2005 budget represents a 49% increase for elementary and secondary education since FY 2001. It includes an additional:

  a.. $1 billion in Title I funding for disadvantaged students, for a total that represents a 52% increase since FY 2001.
  b.. $139 million for reading programs totaling four times the amount spent in FY 2001.
  c.. $1 billion for special education programs, for a 75% increase since FY 2001.
Reading First and Early Reading First – President Bush proposed and signed into law the Reading First and Early Reading First initiatives as part of his unequivocal commitment to ensuring that every child can read by the third grade. These programs enable more children to receive scientifically-based reading instruction programs in the early grades. Over $1.8 billion in Reading First funds have been distributed to the 50 states and the District of Columbia to provide training and instructional materials to tens of thousands of teachers. In addition, since the passage of NCLB, states have received almost $200 million in funds for early childhood reading efforts through such initiatives as Early Reading First and the Early Childhood Educator Professional Development program.

Options Available for Parents – Using tutoring money provided under NCLB, low-income parents of children in schools that have been identified as needing improvement can select from the over 1,600 supplemental service providers approved by the states. With this option, parents, for the first time, can find a program that is focused, rigorous, and directed at the specific needs of their child. Under NCLB, states and school districts publish report cards showing how well students in each socio-economic
sub-group are achieving so that communities and parents can know how well their schools are doing.

Providing Parents with School Choice – President Bush worked with Congress to include a school choice program in the FY 2004 Omnibus Appropriations bill for approximately 1,700 low-income children in the District of Columbia to attend the school of their choice. The President has also requested funding in his budgets for a Choice Incentive Fund, which would support efforts to provide parents, particularly low-income parents, of students who attend low-performing schools with opportunities to transfer their children to higher-performing public, charter, or private schools.

However, they can understand mathematical concepts, mathematical formulation, and most of even the moderately bright ones can understand theorems and proofs. After the schools have had their way with them, this is no longer the case for most.  The “new math” was reasonably successful when taught by those who understood, and was tested on thousands of children; it was the teachers, who had been brought up on computation, who could not learn it. Nonsense repeated is still nonsense.  The “new math” was rushed into place, poorly justiifed by its advocates, strenuously opposed by many mathematicians, and arrogantly imposed without much attempt at educating the parents of the kids experimented on.

The new math was far better tested than most educational innovations.  It took years to develop the materials by seeing what could be done with thousands of children.  The people who produced it had to find how much of what would work.  It did work, when taught by those who could understand mathematics. The teachers entrusted to do the teaching were similarly rushed into it without anyone making any real attempt (as usual) to explain why they should do it. This had been done in all the other innovations.  The mistake was in assuming that what first graders could understand would be easily learned by teachers.  There were summer institutes set up, teachers given time off to learn mathematical concepts, etc.  All of these proved to be of no avail; most of the teachers could not get away from memorization and regurgitation.

It was simply imposed from “on high” (again, as usual).  The outcome was predictable: The kids couldn’t compute, so the parents were up in arms.  The teachers weren’t (uniformly) trained in implimenting the process nor convinced of its efficacy – just like the rest of the population.  All that without even considering that many/most elementary teachers had limited math exposure and generally a long period of inactivity in math prior having this forced on them.

As I stated above, one has to understand concepts to teach them.  Those used to operating with plug-and-chug seem to have lost the ability to do this.  Comparing how many kids could learn it, with how many teachers could, the conclusion seems to be that the ability was lost. What “worked” for the guy pushing it, and for mathematicians who, like you, are unwilling to climb down out of their ivory towers and get their hands dirty in the trenches, may not work for people with little math background, limited training, and no clear reason for taking on a crusade. The mathematicians did “climb down out of their ivory towers”, and developed ways of teaching mathematical concepts to children.  Those methods worked when they, and their students, taught the children.

Most of the teachers had high school algebra and geometry. This was more than enough background.  If we are to have real learning, it must be for the distant future, not to pass the exams. I was present at a place which had a summer institute for high school teachers of mathematics.  This one was for a selected group.  The opinion of those teaching it was that only a small number of them could understand the basic concepts under any circumstances. At the risk of getting my head bitten off (again), I’ll say that education (as Alberto uses the word) is the process of development of mental abilities; and that anyone the child comes in contact with is part of the process of early education. Understandably, the parents are at the top of the list.

Teaching, OTOH, is a process where one individual tries to inculcate knowledge and attitudes into students. Some teachers are very effective; others less so. But the processes which work in teaching are not at all effective in the education of an infant.