Invented Math

Question:  Will the Common Core Standards Fix This?

It’s a rare thing anymore for me to meet a student who knows how to subtract correctly.  Many of them subtract upside down, at least for part of the problem.  I am not talking about little 1^st graders who are just beginning to learn;  most recently I am talking about having met a 2^nd grader closing in on third grade, a 6^th grader, and an 8^th grader all doing the same thing.  Faced with a problem such as 92 – 18, too many of today’s students will place a 6 in the ones column and an 8 in the tens.  The 8^th grader started reaching for his calculator when I told him he was wrong.  He’s been using a calculator for 3 - 4 years now and knows how to do absolutely nothing without it.  That young man opted for an after school tutoring program when he saw I wouldn’t allow him to use his calculator - nor count on his fingers.  (I’m hoping they’ll finally teach him how to do something besides push buttons.)  The 2^nd grader will be fine, and the 6^th grader is learning the multiplication table with mini lessons on adding & subtracting using the age-old, efficient procedures everyone grew up with before the Educators started foisting New Math on us. 

It isn’t hard to figure out how this has been happening – the standards used by Florida, and many other states, have the teachers trying to cram so much material into the kids that there is no time for them to actually learn anything.  The curriculum has everyone flying from one disconnected area to another, often spending no more than a week on any one topic, no matter how complicated, and no matter what the students’ skill set.  One week it’s the four operations with fractions, the next it’s converting decimals to percents – this with kids who hardly know what a fraction is and who have the same problems as above with the four basic operations even with whole numbers. 

Compounding the problem is a lack of emphasis on teaching the standard algorithms for arithmetic operations.  By “standard algorithms” I mean the step by step procedures we older folks all learned as kids.  For instance, with a 2-digit subtraction problem, the student will subtract the ones column first, borrowing if the bottom number is bigger than the top, then subtract the tens column.  (The Experts make a big deal out of calling borrowing and carrying “regrouping” or “exchanging” as if this clarifies matters.  I don’t care if they call it seizing and hauling as long as the kids learn how to solve the problems.) 

Instead, we have parents as well as students struggling with the results of nonsense such as Florida’s 2^nd grade standard MA.2.A.2.2 which states: “Add and subtract multi-digit whole numbers through three digits with fluency by using a variety of strategies, including invented and standard algorithms and explanations of those procedures.”   The key phrases are “variety of strategies” and “invented” algorithms.  This translates to the classroom as an enormous number of methods that must be learned for even the simplest tasks, and they really do mean to have the kids try to invent their own strategies for solving math problems.  This reminds me of how they expected kids to “invent” spelling or “construct” the meaning of text during the dark days of Whole Language.  I am not kidding.  Below is just one quote that can be found by Googling math algorithms.

“Invented strategies are flexible methods of computing that vary with the

numbers and the situation. Successful use of the strategies requires that

they be understood by the one who is using them—hence, the term invented.

Strategies may be invented by a peer or the class as a whole; they may even

be suggested by the teacher. However, they must be constructed by the

student.” 

http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780137149629/downloads/VDW-K_3%20ch06.pdf

The Experts must have gotten tired of waiting for the 7 year olds to come up with algorithms that took a series of geniuses a few centuries to figure out, so they decided to be creative and innovative and invent some themselves.  Under the seductive guise of helping children understand the concepts of math, it’s as if they were trying to make math as hard and horrifying as possible.  Below is one of the more counterproductive “invented algorithms” I’ve seen so far:

To solve 35 – 9, the student is supposed to cross out one of the tens and fill in the bottom block of ten ones with ten little boxes.  Then the student is to cross out the top 5 boxes in the top block of ones plus 4 in the bottom block.  This leaves 2 tens with 6 ones in the bottom block.

The next problem, which is recreated on the back of an envelope, is set up to solve 63 – 28.  The students are to cross out 3 tens, filling the bottom block of ones with ten little boxes (I used slashes).  Then the student is to cross out the 3 ones in the top block plus 5 ones in the bottom block which leaves 3 tens and 5 ones as the answer.

The above were taken from a second-grader’s worksheet with the appropriate standard (above) written in the upper right corner. (Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The expanded form is popular for far too long in a student’s career.  This looks like:

15 + 39

10 + 5 + 30 + 9

10 + 30 + 5 + 9

40 + 10 + 4

50 + 4

This can go even further and look like this at a higher grade level:

34 + 27 = (3 x 10 + 4) + (2 x 10 + 7)              expanded form

= (3 x 10 + 2 x 10) + (4 + 7)                            associative and commutative properties

= (3 x 10 + 2 x 10) + 11

= (3 + 2 + 1) x 10 + 1                                      distributive property

= 6 x 10 + 1 = 61                                             simplified form

http://faculty.atu.edu/mfinan/2033/section12.pdf

And there are these (for 3^rd Grade):

http://bridges1.mathlearningcenter.org/media/Bridges_Gr3_OnlineSupplement/B3SUP-A3_NumMulDigAdd_0309.pdf  

     I found the paragraph under this example pretty interesting.  The kids are instructed to work in pairs or groups, hence the "shared" algorithms.  And the remark about how adults use the method that starts with the 1"s - silly grown-ups!

    And there are these:

http://faculty.atu.edu/mfinan/2033/section12.pdf

If you would like to explore the wonderful world of invented math, all you have to do is Google something like: “Standard algorithm for addition”.  Give yourselves plenty of time, there’re just tons of these examples out there.  I clicked on a couple dozen – they would start off with showing the requested standard procedure and then go off on their flights of fancy.  Many of the sites that exhibit alternative algorithms for basic math have university addresses and are put up by folks who no doubt consider themselves the “Experts” in their fields.  This is not a reason to believe that their opinions deserve any special kind of respect, especially since all their theorizing is proving to be such a dismal failure for so many children.  Should you feel yourself being swept up in their seemingly high-minded, intellectual sounding, jargonistic gobbledy-gook, just remember, it’s people just like these who brought our children travesties like Whole Language and invented spelling – indeed the entire dumbing-down era of OBE and Blueprint 2000.

The public schools are confusing the introductory modeling of math concepts with the methods for performing the functions, and the resulting mish-mash isn’t working.  In fact it’s proving to be detrimental to the academic progress of American students.  This is why we keep having to import so many foreign born, and educated, students to fill up the higher education seats in American Universities – we’re not even teaching our kids how to add and subtract correctly.  And the jobs – the high end, math dependent jobs.

And guess what?  Singapore schools teach their students the standard algorithms!  Duh!

http://prairiematheducation.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/wncp-comparison-version-2.pdf

So – are the Common Core Standards going to fix this?  Maybe not.  We’ll be taking a close look.                                    

Current Events - Florida Test Errors

A mom I know who has children in Florida’s Hillsborough County public schools was telling a group of us about her daughter coming home and complaining about all the grammar errors on a Language Arts test she had taken that day.  This was a Hillsborough County test, not the FCAT.  This 6^th grader counted seventeen errors in the text of the materials themselves; these were not for the students to identify and correct errors deliberately inserted as part of the test.  These tests may have been part of the effort to design the course-specific evaluations that are to assess the new Core Curriculum standards that have the entire nation in a tizzy.  Or perhaps they are more connected to the teacher evaluation effort financed by Bill Gates’ millions.  Hillsborough was one of the districts chosen by the Gates Foundation to pilot school improvement ideas in return for piles of money.  If it’s the latter, we would have to wonder how happy Mr. Gates would be about the lack of quality in such important assessments.

Parents have become too used to finding errors in the written work of Educators at all levels.  Teachers are often lax in spelling and grammar, especially in letters and notes to parents.  This is true even when spelling and grammar checking are readily available to them.  At a slightly higher level, at which tests are designed and written, we have come to expect no better. (Kind of like what we expect of newspapers these days – doesn’t anyone employ editors anymore?)

Take a look at the second grade Reading Comprehension test below.  It looks a bit uneven because the last couple sentences were on a different page.  This multiple choice test was given on a computer at a Pasco County Elementary school using a program called “ExamView Web Site”.  The student had scored poorly, and the concerned parent wanted to see the kind of questions her child had missed.  Ordinarily, parents receive only the question number, the letter response of the student and an “X” next to the errors – not the narrative, not the questions, and nothing very helpful to the worried parent. 

Notice that the first paragraph is indented, but the rest are not.  For children who have been taught that paragraphs start with indented lines, this would be very misleading.  In fact, this child took the test two times, and both times missed number 5 which read, “Which sentence below tells the main idea of the SECOND paragraph?”  There were 11 multiple choice questions plus an essay question, yet the instructions were to “answer the question”. (Sic)  The scoring notes at the top of the test stated that the essay question would not be graded, but that was only half true.  The content was graded, but the spelling and grammar errors were not marked nor noted in any way.  Apparently the scourge of invented spelling is still with us from the days of OBE/Blueprint 2000.

If this parent had not asked to see the actual test, these errors would not have come to light.  The test given to the 6^th grader in Hillsborough is never even seen by the students’ teachers, let alone by the students’ parents.  This is a serious down side to the computerization of the public schools – it can completely obliterate the tiny bit of accountability to the parents that still exists after decades of shoving parents aside.  This takes us in the opposite direction of what is needed if we are to turn our public schools around.  We need more accountability – to the parents – not less.

These examples of sloppiness in the quality of school assessments show a deep lack of respect for students, their parents, teachers, and for the educational profession itself.  It shows a grudging, half-hearted effort on the part of Hillsborough schools in making worthwhile use of Bill Gates’ good-faith financial support for improving student academic achievement.  And it also shows a critical absence of professionalism from people who keep demanding they be treated as professionals.

Drop-Out Prevention Programs - The Family Factors

When schools are in their dumbing down mode, they will be simultaneously shifting the blame for the results to someone or something else.  We were hearing an awful lot about dysfunctional families and at-risk children back when all the Outcome Based changes in the schools were coming down.  These unidentified, horrible families were blamed for everything from why students never had homework to why kids with head lice weren’t sent home.  Students were supposedly not learning to read because the dysfunctional parents weren’t reading to them every night.  The kids were flunking their math tests because the dysfunctional parents weren’t helping them with their homework – this would be the same “homework” that - at that time - few of them were getting.  It became such a pervasive theme that I finally asked a school shrink neighbor of mine for her definition of parents most likely to have at-risk students.  Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Two-income families.”

And here I was expecting the answer to be “Heroin addicts” or something.

Many different family structures, however, will have difficulty when schools stop teaching.  Two-income families have two parents getting home around 6 pm and squeezing meals, housework, laundry, activities, and sometimes more work, etc. into the 2-3 hours before their children’s bed time.  It is very hard for these families to also manage to teach their children how to read and how to perform even simple math problems plus basic grammar, as well as sentence, paragraph and essay writing in, at best, one or two hours a night.  If it’s hard for families with two parents present, you can imagine how hard it is for the single parent.  Plus this is assuming that all parents know how to teach even the earliest basic skills.  I spoke with many, many frustrated and desperate parents who had no idea how to teach and couldn’t understand how this could be expected of them.  Many of those who attended college protested that they didn’t study teaching.  (When I told them that a lot of us who got Education degrees didn’t study teaching either, they would give me funny looks.)  I also met many parents who were embarrassed to tell me that they themselves could not read.  They very much wanted their children to have a better chance.  I still meet illiterate adults – all the time – high school graduates plus - many of them are members of the middle class.

Interestingly, two-income families did not make it to Pasco County’s list of the family factors that would put children at risk of failure during the district’s latest paradigm shift.  See Below (pgs. 6-7):

I cannot stress this enough: The problem we have with our public school system is generational.  Because of especially harsh periods over the course of the last several decades, we’ve had large percentages of two or three generations deliberately dumbed down through the withholding of Phonics instruction, through the uselessness of New Math, through the total absence of grammar instruction, through the neglect of History and Science instruction - the list goes on and on.  These periods last around 10 – 15 years.  There are families who have older children able to read but younger children who can’t read, or vice versa, all because the schools chose to switch away from, or back to, effective reading instruction.  There are far too many families who haven’t had a well-educated generation in ages, simply because the timing of their children has coincided with their area schools’ dumbing down periods. 

In between these especially awful seizures which hit all children no matter what their family’s status, we’ve had outright discrimination against minorities, the recently immigrated and the poor of all colors.  All it takes is ineffective teachers using counterproductive teaching methods and weak materials.  I believe that the widening gap between the Haves and the Have-Not’s is caused essentially by the wide differences in educational quality available to America’s children in their public school system.  This inequality has been enabled by the lack of options given to the vast majority of parents.

The list above reflected the Educators’ confident expectation that it would be mostly poorly educated parents who would be providing the system with the subjects for their latest drop-out program research.  The uneducated are primarily clustered in poor, low-income families, many with a history of school drop-outs and dysfunction.   There is a great deal of stress in single parent and/or low-income households, and limited monitoring of student activities can occur when the adults are working two jobs or can’t afford daycare or any number of other circumstances. The poorly educated also will have low expectations for their children’s academic success because they never had any school success themselves and have no idea how to attain such a thing. We have to understand that most people who do poorly in school believe the fault lies within themselves, that there is something wrong with them, and that this wrong thing is genetic.  That’s what they’ve been told all their lives. “I’m dyslexic”, they’ll say, “And it runs in the family.” People who can’t read aren’t going to have books, magazines or newspapers in their houses, let alone “study aids”.  The lack of explicit instruction in the sound/spelling connections and the standard rules of grammar of the English language proves especially devastating to the progress of ESL children.  There was strong protest during the OBE days against fraudulent ESL classes that claimed to boost pride in the children’s diverse cultures, but proved much better at withholding the language skills that would help them succeed in their new American culture.

By improving no further than low-grade mediocrity, which looks so much better when compared to the sheer horror of what went before, the Educators continuously produce a steady supply of poorly educated children who will become the barely functional parents of tomorrow.  In fact, the E’s are just beginning to start the whole process all over again with new mandates and new goals and all kinds of promises – just as the victims of OBE have reached parenthood age.  This continuous loop of mediocrity - and worse - is not going to be corrected by shifting toward and mandating online instruction.  It wasn’t the lack of computers that led to our academic decline.  Nor is it going to improve the state of America’s public schools to have the E’s write yet another set of learning goals – we had goals galore during OBE/Blueprint 2000.  The only thing that is going to get Americans out of this cycle of educational abuse is universal parental choice.  The parents should choose whether or not their children take online courses at all, especially since reading text on a computer is already proving to be less effective than reading from print.  They also should be able to choose which online courses their children take since some of these courses are already getting iffy reviews.  I’ve heard of some students taking online gym classes – the fact that this would even be offered as a way for students to fulfill their online class mandate should disqualify educators from making these decisions.  Lots of decisions the schools have made over the course of the last 100 years or so should disqualify them from ever making choices for other people’s children ever again.  Universal parental choice – until we have that, we’ll continue to sink.

Florida’s Racially Biased Goals

I thought I should weigh in on the latest education controversy before too much more time went by.  I’ve been reading material from the DOE web site where the goals first appeared – and the written explanations that popped up once the outcries began.  This took quite a lot of time which is why this blog is late.  Educators are nothing if not wordy, and only doctors and lawyers can come close to beating them at jargon.  I’m not done yet, but here’s what we know so far.  As part of their latest 6-year plan, ending in 2018, the E’s came up with the following goals for Reading and Math:  http://www.fldoe.org/board/meetings/2012_10_09/strategicv3.pdf

·        90% of Asian-American students reading at or above grade level

·       88% of White students reading at or above grade level 

·       82% of American Indian students reading at or above grade level

·       81% of Hispanic students reading at or above grade level

·       74% of Black/African-American students reading at or above grade level  

•  92% of Asian-American students at grade level in Math
• 86% of White students at grade level in Math
• 81% of American Indian students at grade level in Math
• 80% of  Hispanic students at grade level in Math
• 74% of Black/African American students at grade level in Math  

Naturally, the public responded with dismay.  This is outright bigotry much more blatantly displayed than usual.  And, as usual, the Educators have responded with explanations that sound well-reasoned and logical.  It’s just being realistic, they say, to factor in where everyone’s starting points are in determining goals that are attainable.  They insist that since minority children begin so far behind, these goals reflect a very aggressive effort.  69% of White students currently score at grade level which would only have to improve by 19 percentage points, while only 38% of Black students currently score at grade level and would have to improve by 36 percentage points.  Plus, these are just the interim goals; 100% of everyone will be reaching grade level in everything by 2022.  Really – they have charts!  And anyway, they’re just doing what it takes to get the grant money from the Fed’s (and now we finally approach the crux of the matter).  There’s this “Federal Flexibility Waiver” with “Annual Measurable Objectives”.  This is all just the beginning of an honest and forthright discussion of what is possible.  Really!

Except there is no mention of the fact that minorities are so far behind because of the system’s own policies, teaching methods, and curricula for many generations now.  There is no acknowledging that this same spiel is used every time there is yet more “school improvement” coming down the pike.  There is the admitting that since 2001, the White/Black gap has closed a mere 5%, but there is no mention that the improvement plans of that time were heralded with just as much fanfare – and just as many optimistic charts. 

Honest?  Here’s what “honest” looks like:  The reason so many minority children struggle with learning to read is because so many of them speak a minority dialect.  I’m not talking about a regional accent; I’m talking about a mode of language that diverges strongly from Standard English.  A minority dialect is Exhibit A that there has been no education available to these speakers no matter how many years they have attended school.  This is also an indication that there has been either inadequate or no Phonics instruction in these schools, often for generations.  The stronger the dialect, the worse the schools have been for a longer time.  For Phonics to be effective, the students must learn to pronounce the sounds of Standard English.  This doesn’t mean that the kids should be humiliated or disdained – which has certainly happened in way too many classrooms (especially right after integration).  But it does mean that children will need to be corrected when they mispronounce words, and to do this has been politically incorrect since at least the 60’s-70’s.  It is now seen as disrespectful of a child’s culture to correct that child’s speech.  So the Phonics lessons, if there are any at all, are ineffective, the children do not learn to read, and education is rendered impossible.  It’s all completely unnecessary; many well-educated minority adults are able to switch from Standard English to their home dialect, or language, quite easily.  A good school should be able to teach Standard pronunciation without extinguishing either a child’s home language or self-esteem.  I just don’t believe that our current school personnel will have the guts to realize the depth of their responsibility for the racial aspect of the reading gap, nor will they come up with adequate answers to the problem.

So many of us now believe that minority parents will be horribly insulted if we correct their child’s speech that it will take parental choice to turn this around.  In order to avoid protest and backlash, the parents must be the people who decide whether or not their children will be instructed in Standard pronunciation and corrected – with kindness and good humor, please – when they need it.  Something tells me that many, many minority parents would opt for the reading instruction that has been proven to be most effective for centuries.

Old Research – I

I prefer calling education reform “parental choice” instead of “school choice” because it’s the schools that have been making all the decisions for many decades now while shunting aside the concerns of parents, often ruthlessly.  Parents receive very little respect, even while the schools insist that they welcome parental involvement.  One of the most ridiculous contradictions of OBE/ Blueprint 2000 was the Educators’ moaning and groaning over the lack of parental involvement and how dysfunctional so many of the parents were – when there we were, hundreds strong, screaming bloody murder against all these horrible “reforms” being shoved down our children’s throats.  The E’s didn’t want our involvement in the form of opinions; they wanted us involved in taking all the blame for our children’s failures. 

If there had been universal parental choice during those dark days of the 90’s when that latest onslaught of “dumbnation” started coming down, we would have been able to nip it in the bud.  When the schools didn’t respond to our concerns, we could’ve taken our kids elsewhere.  (Many of us did, but the alternatives back then were extremely expensive).  And, in fact, if earlier generations of parents hadn’t gradually lost their voices and their choices, they would have been able to prevent the wholesale decline of the American public school system by refusing to have children used as guinea pigs for decades worth of often pointless, repetitive education research.

Research such as the following on student motivation:

“Specified Comment students, regardless of teacher or student differences, all received comments designated in advance for each letter grade, as follows:

                 A. Excellent!  Keep it up.

                 B. Good work.  Keep it up.

                 C. Perhaps try to do still better?

                 D. Let’s bring this up.

                 F.  Let’s raise this grade!

Teachers were instructed to administer the comments ‘rapidly and automatically, trying not even to notice who the students are.” (Foundations of Behavioral Research, pg.46-47).  There were also “Free Comment” and “No Comment” categories included in this experiment which involved 74 different classrooms.  The above was a quote from a paper published in 1958 in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

So an A student who suddenly gets an F gets a robotic response from a teacher who is ignoring who the student is, or no comment at all, in two-thirds of the classes.  How many of these students’ parents were informed that this was going to be happening to their children?  I’m guessing none of them.

Educational researchers will often have an idea (hypothesis) of the results of various experiments to the point of knowing which methods will probably have a positive, neutral or a negative effect on achievement.  They will go ahead and implement the negatively effective method anyway.  In fact, the bigger the difference in the quality of teaching methods the better, because that way they get more significant “experimental variances” – which is how these folks get their jollies. 

“Suppose an investigator tests the relative efficacies of three different methods of teaching a physical education skill.  After teaching three groups of children, each group being taught by a different method, he compares the means of the groups. ….. (bunch of math) … In the methods experiment just described, presumably the methods tend to ‘bias’ the achievement scores one way or another.  This is, of course, the experimenter’s purpose: he wants Method A, say, to increase all the achievement scores of an experimental group.  He may believe that Method B will have no effect of achievement, and that Method C will have a depressing effect.”  (Kerlinger, FBR, 1964, pg. 98)

Mom and Dad tell the gym teacher he/she is teaching the skill incorrectly.  And nothing changes.

Quote from R. Koenker, “Arithmetic Readiness at the Kindergarten Level,” Journal of Educational Psychology, XLII (1948)

“….in an interesting little experiment on arithmetic readiness in the kindergarten child, Koenker manipulated experimental groups by giving them an enriched-numbers and arithmetic-concepts program.  He held his control groups constant or at the same level by not giving them a readiness program, by letting them have the regular kindergarten program ‘without enrichment’.  Statistically speaking, he was trying to increase the between-groups variance.  (He succeeded.)” (FBR, pg 99)

Were parents given the option of having their children participate in the arithmetic readiness program?  Since the readiness program was obviously successful, why don’t all kindergartens have it available?  Even almost ten years after the results of this experiment were published, when I was in kindergarten, we played and learned rules and how to button our coats.  My parents would’ve definitely opted for arithmetic readiness.

There’s a lot more evidence of our school system having lost its bearings because of the influence of research dollars that have been pouring into our schools for many decades now.  They don’t seem to realize that what they’ve been doing is wrong, so their work is in full view in publications and papers and books – work paid for by the American taxpayers.  It’s ours, and we need to start using it to make our own choices for our children.

The Meaningless OBE Grading System

Parents should be able to choose grading systems for their children that are clear, understandable and accurately reflect their children’s achievements.

During all the protesting and petition gathering back in the 1990’s, I mentioned to one of Pasco County’s public school administrators, in a social setting, that my children had been negatively affected by the new grading system.  She nodded her head and said she could see how my daughter could be hurt by the change.  I told her it was hurting my son much more, and she seemed very surprised.  She wasn’t surprised that the new report cards were hurting students, just taken aback by which students were being harmed.  This was the first indication I had that the people in charge of my children’s education found it acceptable to cause harm to some children.  Somehow, school personnel had come to believe that some children would be helped by the harming of other children.  This must be how the Educators were able to justify implementing methods and curricula that were proven to not work, at least not work to the benefit of their students.  It didn’t matter that they themselves were the reason the kids from the poorer, and more poorly educated, families were suffering mightily.  And they had nothing but scorn for the middle-class, better educated families who led the charge against the new report cards because of the negative affect it was having on their kids.  They were, after all, calling this paradigm shift “school improvement”, not “student improvement”, and improving the schools meant bringing in more money.

This Educrat’s opinion that it would be my daughter more harmed confirmed what many parents had already begun to observe – it was especially the higher achievers who were losing motivation and the willingness to work hard to do their best.  My daughter, Faith, was a “99er”, meaning she scored in the 99^th percentile on her SAT’s (this was before the FCAT), and received all A’s all the time in everything.  She didn’t receive much homework, but she had more assigned to her than her brother who was two years older.  Each of her teachers assured me at the end of every year that they were going to “take very good care” of her, which I took to mean that she would be placed with the best teacher available at the next grade level.  Faith was in 3^rd grade when the new report card was adopted and received all E’s.  The 1^st marking period of 4^th grade, she brought home all S’s.  She wondered what she had done wrong and insisted that she had worked very hard to do her best – which her dad and I already knew.  I set up an appointment with her teacher – with Faith coming as well.

I really liked my daughter’s 4^th grade teacher.  He told us that the only reason she received all S’s was because of a new rule stating that E’s could not be given in the first marking period.  There was some vague explanation that it would be “impossible” for a student to do so well after a whole summer off from school.  Talk about low expectations!  I asked did Faith “extend and apply all knowledge new and old”?  He answered “Always.”  I then turned to Faith and made sure she understood that the S’s were because of a new rule and that her teacher knew she deserved E’s on all her work.  Was that OK?  Was it enough for her to know that?  She said yes.  It was this understanding that helped her overcome the damage of the new system, but I’m not sure how much longer her strength of will would have held up – remember, she was 8 years old.

I’m very aware that there are excellent schools, especially at the college level, that have abandoned the ABC grading system for a system more reliant on portfolios of students’ work and projects and written commentary by their professors.  These assessments seem to work best for students who have tested into the schools and who have proven that they have all the foundational knowledge necessary to do well with a very rigorous curriculum.  For the most part, however, when schools do away with marking and grading using the traditional 92%-100 = A, etc., it’s because they are withholding skills and knowledge and are trying to hide the fact that more and more of their students cannot read, have no idea where to place commas, and can’t add even small numbers without using their fingers.  With the second-year change, E no longer meant “Extends and applies all knowledge…”, and with S meaning anything from A to C (and even plunging from A to C!), this was essentially a non-grade system in disguise.  This meaningless report card, in conjunction with OBE/Blueprint 2000’s disdain for direct, explicit instruction, caused a great deal of harm, indeed.

The Meaningless OBE Grading System

I believe that parents should be able to choose their children’s grading system.

The grading system put into place before the full onslaught of Blueprint 2000/OBE curricula was almost immediately effective at changing many students’ attitudes toward academic achievement.  The schools removed the familiar ABCDF grades on report cards and replaced them with: E (Extends and applies any knowledge, new or old), S (Satisfactory progress), P (In the process of learning) and U (Unsatisfactory).  This was implemented in the elementary schools with plans to move it up into the higher grades - according the state level E’s own written plans - although the middle school administrators I spoke with denied it.  And, as it turned out, the parents were able to at least stop it from going any farther.  People across the state poured into the schools to protest, and when that had no effect, they started passing out petitions and showing up at school board meetings.  Articles appeared in the newspapers – the internet wasn’t very widely used back then.  The Pasco County School Board decided to take a survey of the teachers since there were protests from many of them as well.  The following is a close copy of a letter I wrote to School Board members at the time of that survey.  I have shortened it, but the description of the effect the new system had on my son and many others remains intact.  The sad thing is that grading systems similar to this one have been tried many times in the past – and always bring about the same results for many students.

“May 21, 1993

Dear School Board Members,

One of the things you may hear from the teachers as part of the survey will be that students lost their motivation or will to achieve.  This was not covered as well as I’d hoped at the school board meeting, mostly because the speakers were so focused on the effect of the E S P U grading system on a student’s chances at higher education.  The story of what happened at my house might help illustrate what ‘loss of motivation’ looks like on the home front.

When the new grading system came about, my first ‘gut’ reaction was that this was not a good idea, but I, like many other parents, gave it a year to see how it worked.  It did not take a full year to see that something was seriously wrong.  My son was in fifth grade and, as always, seemed content and genuinely interested in many of the new things he was learning.  He earned mostly S’s, with an occasional E in Art and Spelling.  I did not become alarmed until one day I tackled the chore of cleaning out his back pack, which was such a mess I knew there had to be plenty of papers I hadn’t seen yet.  I found three Science test papers that had half the answers marked as incorrect.  The number grades were in the 70’s; they were C’s.  These tests were on topics that Douglas had discussed at the dinner table with some enthusiasm, so I was quite surprised to see he had done so poorly on the tests.  I called his teacher.

This is how I found out that ‘S’ had a range of anywhere from A work to C work, and my reaction was extremely negative.  I had a wonderful talk with his teacher which gave me a much better idea of what I was going to be dealing with for the rest of the school year.  When he got home, I showed him the test papers and asked him if he was having trouble with any of the material covered on them.  He said no, he wasn’t.  Then he told me it was okay, it was still an ‘S’.  The bottom line of the rest of the conversation was that he had simply started goofing off.  He wasn’t paying as close attention during class, and never bothered reviewing the material before a test.  … I explained that his job in school was to do the best work that he could, and that I was sure he could do much better than those tests reflected.  The rest of the year, Douglas would fluctuate from good work to lackadaisical work, with us constantly propping him back up.  Finally, one day, I got fed up, and I found myself telling him that I didn’t care what his school said; our family did its best no matter what we set out to do.  That appeared to do the trick – it became a matter of family pride and accomplishment.  But I don’t think I could ever express to you how thoroughly disgusted I was that that is what I had to tell him.”

As a result of all the ruckus, each school took a vote on either going back to the old grading system or continuing with the new.  Some schools continued with the ESPU system despite how the parents felt about it, and despite what it was doing to so many students.  For the large majority of parents, this is how things still stand on all too many issues concerning education.   Let me emphasize – the grading system was not the experiment.  The effect of the new grading system was known in advance.