"I get in trouble for the B-plusses"

"I get in trouble for those," said Mr. Visco, pointing to the scant B-pluses sprinkled here and there in a sea of A's.

It was somewhere around 1980 and now a teacher myself I was back to visit my favorite teachers at my '69 alma mater high school in Tenafly, New Jersey, an upper middle class bedroom community for NYC feeding students into the Ivy League.

Not sure how grade inflation came up, but his remark came after I doubted some assertion of his that he, one of the toughest teachers in the school, could no longer grade honestly.  So he had pulled out his gradebook and showed me the sea of A's.

"But you have tenure," I floundered. "How can they control you?"

"There are things they can do," he said. I remember only one of several. "They can take away the honors class."

This is a very long story. It begins with the US high school class of 1971, the first year not subjected to the draft to go fight in Vietnam, the war we were supposed to learn from before...I digress.

Once the draft was no longer a threat to the middle class, we looked around and what did we see?

First, traditional authorities had lost all credibility. This mostly had to do with a federal government leading us into the hell of Vietnam, but along the way also the rejection of police and college authority. Folks dictating rigid sexual mores and drug abstinence were now scorned. Not only Vietnam was involved. A little thing known as the Civil Rights movement also knocked governments on their heels. We the People were no longer impressed by City Hall in any form, and we were indeed ready to fight.

Second, whoa. Look at us! We are prosperous! A population that had lived for twelve years with the depression starting in 1929 first had the economy stimulated by World War II and then, when that nightmare ended, saw a wonderful period of growth first forming a solid middle class and by the late sixties a solid upper middle class.

What do newly empowered prosperous people do with institutions they no longer revere, such as the school boards of upper middle class communities? School boards for which our affluent populations vote? Our affluent parents start dictating new standards guaranteed to get their children 4.0 averages and a shot at the Ivy League.

Back to my high school. Mr. Visco was tough but he was also a delightful flake (and future principal of the high school!!!). I still did not buy it, his gradebook evidence notwithstanding. My next stop was Mrs. Willens, my French teacher. I have heard about nuns in parochial school and I am pretty sure Mrs. Willens taught them tyranny. I was a great student and a favorite of hers and she absolutely terrorified me.

I asked her about the grading silliness Visco had described. Mrs. Willens without hesitation confirmed every word. If they had had video cameras everywhere back then you would have seen my jaw literally drop.

Need something more than anecdotal evidence from two great, tough teachers in a feeder high school for top colleges? Easy. Look at the surge from the mid-sixties on, especially leading up to the mid-70s. Notice also that it is much worse in private schools, where the tuition paid and unvarying Ivy goal brings even more pressure on schools and teachers to churn out 4.0 averages.

Google prize to the person who can find the NY Times 90s-ish story on the New England admissions officer who said they did not even look at grades any more, just SATs.

So what happened when parents started getting teachers in trouble for B-plusses? You might think kids would work less and learn less. You might be right. It was described beautifully in A Nation At Risk.

The funny thing is that the CCSS crowd says the problem is accountability. Ha! You want to talk about accountability? In small communities with local school boards and separate school budget votes we have nothing but accountability and what the parents have demanded and gotten is grade inflation. The parents have afflicted the teachers. Accountabilize that.

Sadly, history has been rewritten. Naughty, lazy, incompetent schools and teachers have been misleading the parents! By giving them the grades they demanded! Here is an otherwise solid story where the author is wholly oblivious to parental strong-arming of schools and teachers.

Losing this bit of history does more than cause us to misplace blame. It has also produced the motive force of CCSS: accountability of schools and teachers, complete with the threat of closings and terminations. The message of CCSS is, "Here are some great new standards, we are not going to tell you how to teach them we are going to fire you or close your school if you do poorly on the questionable tests we also did not specify."

Don't you just love it when government swings into action on something they know nothing about?

CCSS did not understand that parents had provoked the mess, so they took a threatening stance facing teachers using ominous terms like "high stakes testing" thinking they had the parents at their back. Yes, the parents at your back. With arrows strung and bows drawn. It is now late 2014 and after five long years the scores are coming in and CCSS -- surprise, surprise -- is under attack.

CCSS needs some Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

The parents are getting what they demanded, and no one who does not understand that impetus has a prayer of turning things around.

I know what Arne Duncan means when he mocks upper middle-class white moms discovering their little darlings are not geniuses, but he is confusing two distinct upper middle-class phenomena. The first was not moms being deceived by schools who said their children were gifted, it was those moms and dads leaning on school boards shaking them down for the A's that would get their kids into Ivy League schools.

The second, unrelated phenomenon was the mistake of motivating folks with "My kid is an honor student" bumper stickers. One would rather face the mom of a starving tiger cub than tell a parent of a kid with a B-minus average they cannot have a bumper sticker.

It's a paper chase, right? We all want the best for our kids, perfectly natural. They do not need to know anything to get into Harvard, they need a 4.0 average! Grade by grade, paper by paper: "Why is this not an A? Show me what is wrong with this?". Of course A means "exceptional" and C means "nothing really wrong with it", but the standard had shifted. Everyone was now "A until proven unsatisfactory".

I saw this first-hand in 1973, years earlier, in one of my last undergraduate classes. A student-friendly, socially-correct, left-wing professor was spending class time on a defense. Of some new research result? No, of the scores he had given on our most recent test. I had not done very well, but I was from the outset appalled at the idea of him defending his scoring.

His process involved reading a question from the essay exam and then reading an answer to which he had given full credit. There was one question worth seven points, and when he read the answer I thought I was listening to a speech by Bill Clinton. Finally, it came to an end.

"That's an awful lot for a seven," said one of the leaders of the scoring rebellion.

"Isn't that what a seven is supposed to mean?" I asked from the back of the room, surprising even myself.

The rebel blustered, the professor retreated under cover of the fire I had unintentionally provided.

"I have nothing to add to your dialogue," he said.

But there it was. 1973 and the new standard for "full marks" was "I covered the minimum."

By the way, if upper middle class Ivy-seeking parents are not being misled, perhaps the inner city parents are? That was where I did the bulk of my teaching, and there the story was different. One of the greatest teachersI had ever known  (an African-American, FWIW) filled me in: no one failed. If they put in their time, they got their high school degree. Why?

Think Wizard of Oz. He gave Scarecrow a diploma, and explained rather accurately that that was the only thing he needed.  This teacher was explaining that, no matter what, the kids would get their high school diplomas, so they would have a shot in the job market.

The CCSS crowd is about to discover that standards and tests alone will not change the world, because tougher standards and tests will just fail lots of students.

Their premise is that schools and teachers will be able to get students up to the standards as long as they are threatened with closings and termination, that it is just a matter of will.

Nonsense, but that's another blog entry.

Apple's sexy new iPad now has a bit of an Algebra experiment underway: HMH Fuse: Algebra 1 is being tried out in a number of California schools, with the iPads being provided by Houghton-Mifflin.

Much of Fuse: Algebra 1 (F:A1) is old news. Kids already have access to Algebra on the Web, including on-demand video instruction on specific topics and step-by-step solutions to sample problems. But google this story enough and one discovers that the educational model will also change to make the teacher more of a mentor while kids themselves will determine their own path to Algebra mastery. Good things happen by letting folks decide their own course, so why do I not think this product will help much?

One simple reason, in one compound word: multiple-choice. With F:A1, problems are presented in multiple-choice form and no successful math tutor can be built atop multiple-choice.What is wrong with multiple-choice? It means the only tutorial intervention while the student is working is answer-checking. That is not enough.

What about the video lessons and solved examples? All good, which is why F:A1 will help a little, but true learning begins only when we ourselves attempt a new task. Confucius was more eloquent:

I hear and I forget. I see and I believe. I do and I understand.

Students can listen in class or watch problems solved by the teacher and think they understand, but only when they themselves tackle a problem do they:

• realize they are not quite sure what to do; and
• make mistakes involving prerequisite skills (a big problem for many students).

But most software Algebra tutors are nowhere to be found at this critical juncture. They are simply waiting for the student to finish working on paper and to come back and type in A, B, C, or D. As an experienced private Algebra tutor, I know students have trouble at every step of a solution, with the first step usually being the toughest since that is most often where the key new transformation introduced by the day's lesson must be applied. Any software Algebra tutor that wants to make more than a marginal improvement in how kids experience Algebra must be involved in every step they do.

Yes, multiple-choice is the nearly universal standard for computer Algebra tutors, but as these notes reveal, computer Algebra tutors are also largely ineffective. (Or we would not be talking about an Algebra crisis.)

So why does most software work this way? Two reasons, both having to do with development cost. First, to check intermediate steps, one has to let the student type mathematics the way you can here. But that kind of math editor is quite hard to write. Second, checking intermediate steps means creating a software Algebra expert that can recognize any possible approach the student might take to a solution, and there can be many. Again, quite hard to develop. So instead students end up with multiple-choice.

This page includes a link to a video (look for "Watch Fuse: Algebra 1 in action") where in the opening scene you can get a feel for how students do Algebra with F:A1. The bit where she uses the scratchpad to enter "6 - 2 = 4" as if she could not do it in her head tips us off that this is a major shortcoming of the product. Imagine her using that to simplify algebraic fractions involving parentheses and exponents. Even if it were feasible, the F:A1 software still would not be checking her work or offering hints -- it does not see the scratchpad work.I

t does not have to be this way. The software here lets students type readable math and work on problems step-by-step, asking for hints or seeing random examples solved and explained, having every step of every problem checked as soon as it is entered. That is where F:A1 needs to go next if it wants to transform Algebra instruction to any interesting degree.

Trouble in Monterey

A blow-by-blow replay of a disappointing

on-line Algebra experience at

the Monterey Institute.

[Originally posted here. Everything below will make a lot more sense if you open the lesson being discussed in a second window and follow along. The lesson is here.]

We start with a word problem, the kind one would never have to solve in life. Super.

The answer is 2n so I choose n/2 to see what happens. The software says "Incorrect" in red, does not offer the correct answer, and simply encourages me to go on to the next slide. Very helpful. I guess the idea is to throw in an interaction so we do not fall asleep reading the material, but not to try teaching at this point since that will come later. I guess, but then they should say "Incorrect. Not to worry, we'll work on this more later." But then I am reminded of the teacher who will not take a question that occurs to me now because they pre-planned a presentation that answered it some other time. Well excuuuse me.

Having no choice, I hit "Next". The material continues like this until eventually I get to play with two helicopters to solve x/2 - 3 = 1. I found myself wondering where the two expressions came from and why a helicopter would be doing hovering at x/2 - 3, but I was always a troublemaker in school.

Nowhere does the software talk about even needing to keep the two choppers at the same altitude, let alone why we would have to in terms of what the choppers were doing (which was nothing).

Me, I like see-saws which are level when the two sides are the same, just as we want to preserve an equation's truth as we transform it. Anyway...

Clicking +3 (we are offered only adding or multiplying plus or minus 1 thru 3) on the first chopper moves it up but leaves the expression as x/2 - 3. It should have changed to x/2. In case you think I did not understand the task, the other chopper's expression indeed changed from 1 to 4 when I clicked +3. Total bug there.

Clicking x2 (meaning multiply, not the variable "x") finally changes the first chopper's expression to x. The other chopper continues to work and becomes 8. Yeah!!!!!!

Now the accompanying text simply goes wrong, saying we have to add before we multiply. No, that just makes it easier.

It gets worse: the text says that if we multiply by 2 first we will end up with the wrong answer, x=5. Nonsense, as the graphic shows: we end up with x - 3 = 5, what it calls "an incomplete solution".

Thought one: an incomplete solution is not a solution! Add 3 to both sides!!

Second thought: how on Earth did we get to x-3=5? By going x/2-3=1 to 2(x/2-3)=2*1 to x-6=2 to x-6+3=2+3 to x-3=5. ie, Right, they accepted as inevitable the two operations of adding at most 3 and multiplying by at most 3, with nothing else permitted. Hunh? Math is done with pushbuttons, and only certain ones?

Just this little bit of material is wrong in one place, inconsistent with itself, confusing, unmotivating, and plain leaves out the fundamental concept of preserving the truth of the equation as necessary, ie, never mentions that we need to keep the choppers at the same altitude.

On-line and interactive is only as good as the underlying fundamental material, and in that regard Monterey comes up short. They made a brave effort and they have my sympathy over the bugs (software validation is a pain) and they mean well, but this site is worse than no site at all.