- Posted by David on January 26, 2009
II Doesn't Always = II
Similarities in Advanced High School Math Courses Often Mask Differences in Standards and Requirements
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 26, 2009; B01
From Northwest Washington to the suburbs of Fairfax and Prince George's counties, advanced algebra often appears the same from class to class: Students are expected to learn dozens of skills, including factoring trinomials, solving rational equations and graphing quadratic functions.
But behind the surface similarities, experts say, there can be wide variations in what students learn in a course seen as critical to developing a math-savvy workforce for the digital age.
Those variations reflect, in part, patchwork government policy: The District, like many states, is moving toward a mandate for all students to pass Algebra II before graduating. Maryland and Virginia are not.
On the other hand, although all three jurisdictions have raised expectations for what should be taught in the class, only Virginia requires Algebra II students to take a standardized test to show they have learned the material.
Historically, "academic standards have been all over the place," said Sandy Boyd, a vice president at Achieve in the District. The organization works with states to strengthen education standards and graduation requirements to prepare students for college or more than a dead-end job. If students can crack advanced algebra, experts say, their college chances and career prospects will be brighter and their future evenings free from rehashing the same concepts in community college.
Accordingly, 20 states and the District have made Algebra II, or an equivalent course, a must for a high school diploma, up from two states in 2005. Deborah A. Gist, the District's state superintendent of education, said the requirement, approved in 2007, was overdue.
"This is our attempt to make sure our students can stay competitive," she said.
Top students have long been expected to take advanced algebra. At Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, a college preparatory magnet school near downtown Washington, two dozen students spent a wintry afternoon multiplying matrixes. The multi-step problem, which involved manipulating three rows and three columns of numbers, would have been a quick calculator job. But Sandra Allen said she wanted to give her class some enrichment.
At the District's neighborhood high schools, though, many students struggle with rudimentary skills. On a national math test given to District eighth-graders in 2007, 34 percent scored at the basic level or better. By 2011, those students will need to pass four years of math, including Algebra II, to receive a regular diploma.
Laura Slover, a D.C. State Board of Education member who is also a vice president at Achieve, said the requirement is a first step. But to meet the goal, she said, the District must improve teacher training, support students who are lagging and synchronize instruction from preschool on.
"Raising graduation requirements does not mean that all students magically meet them," Slover said.
Some advocates of expanding access to higher math said that making Algebra II a uniform expectation is a civil rights issue because the course is widely considered an important bridge to college -- a bridge that many poor or minority students miss.
But Maryland and Virginia educators said it is important for the course to remain challenging. Officials estimate that two-thirds of the students in each state take the course now. They would like to increase that number, but not all at once.
"I want to make sure that if a student takes a course, it's really a significant course, not a watered-down version," said Ronald A. Peiffer, Maryland deputy state superintendent for academic policy.
Peiffer said that when the state made Algebra I a graduation requirement in the early 1990s, many schools began offering two versions, the traditional course and one some teachers called "baby algebra." The state tried to rectify the disparity later, mandating an end-of-course graduation test for Algebra I that students are expected to pass to receive a diploma.
Robert Bradford, a teacher at Fairmont Heights High School, a high-poverty school in Prince George's, said efforts to strengthen Algebra I through the graduation test have hurt his Algebra II classes.
Students spend so much time preparing for the test, which includes questions on data analysis and statistics, Bradford said, that they miss out on key algebraic concepts. Now he begins Algebra II at "chapter zero," covering material students should have learned but didn't. "It's a step backwards," he said.
Virginia students must pass Algebra II if they want an "advanced" diploma, which about half of graduates received last year. Other graduates do not need to take the course.
The state plans to offer another version of Algebra II with more statistics and data analysis for those pursuing technical diplomas. The course would be less theoretical, but education officials predict that it will still prepare students for college-level math.
Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright said that students should be given incentives to take the more challenging class but that it should not be mandated.
"We will testify to the rigor of our algebra course," she said.
Statewide, 90 percent of Virginia Algebra II students passed the end-of-course Standards of Learning exam, which means they answered correctly at least 30 of 50 questions. Thirty-six percent received an advanced rating, which means they got at least 45 answers right.
Maryland and the District are considering standardized testing to help gauge how much students are learning.
Last year, a dozen states tried an exam that they designed together, in coordination with Achieve. The test is meant to be tough, with open-ended questions as well as multiple-choice ones. In some states, only one in five students passed. A small group of Maryland students will try it out in the spring.
At Fairfax High School, Tricia Colclaser's Algebra II class moves quickly. One recent morning, after a unit on quadratic equations, she explained three approaches to graphing second-degree equations. Near the end of the lesson, a student asked, "How do you know when it's a quadratic equation?"
To help students keep up, time is left open in their schedules to seek extra instruction from teachers. And a tutoring program pairs honor students with those who want more help.
During a free period after class, junior Musa Condah, 17, often stays to finish his homework and meet with a tutor. He is a popular athlete and diligent math student.
"I'm not the best math guy, but I'm trying to pay attention," he said. "Nowadays, it's all about technology and computers. Everyone needs math."
- Posted by David on January 12, 2009
January 11, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Over the next couple of years, two very big countries, America and China, will give birth to something very important. They’re each going to give birth to close to $1 trillion worth of economic stimulus — in the form of tax cuts, infrastructure, highways, mass transit and new energy systems. But a lot is riding on these two babies. If China and America each give birth to a pig — a big, energy-devouring, climate-spoiling stimulus hog — our kids are done for. It will be the burden of their lifetimes. If they each give birth to a gazelle — a lean, energy-efficient and innovation-friendly stimulus — it will be the opportunity of their lifetimes.
So here’s hoping that our new administration and Congress will be guided in shaping the stimulus by reading John Maynard Keynes in one hand — to get as much money injected as quickly as possible — and by reading “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future” with the other.
“Gathering Storm” was the outstanding 2005 report produced by our National Academies on how to keep America competitive by vastly improving math and science education, investing in long-term research, recruiting top students from abroad and making U.S. laws the most conducive in the world for innovation.
You see, even before the current financial crisis, we were already in a deep competitive hole — a long period in which too many people were making money from money, or money from flipping houses or hamburgers, and too few people were making money by making new stuff, with hard-earned science, math, biology and engineering skills.
The financial crisis just made the hole deeper, which is why our stimulus needs to be both big and smart, both financially and educationally stimulating. It needs to be able to produce not only more shovel-ready jobs and shovel-ready workers, but more Google-ready jobs and Windows-ready and knowledge-ready workers.
If we spend $1 trillion on a stimulus and just get better highways and bridges — and not a new Google, Apple, Intel or Microsoft — your kids will thank you for making it so much easier for them to commute to the unemployment office or mediocre jobs.
Barack Obama gets it, but I’m not sure Congress does. “Yes,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday, “we’ll put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges and schools by eliminating the backlog of well-planned, worthy and needed infrastructure projects. But we’ll also do more to retrofit America for a global economy.” Sure that means more smart grids and broadband highways, he added, but it also “means investing in the science, research and technology that will lead to new medical breakthroughs, new discoveries and entire new industries.”
But clean-tech projects like intelligent grids and broadband take a long time to implement. Can we stimulate both our economy and our people in time? Maybe rather than just giving everyone a quick $1,500 to hit the mall to buy flat-screen TVs imported from China, or creating those all-important green-collar jobs for low-skilled workers — to put people to work installing solar panels and insulating homes — we should also give everyone who is academically eligible and willing a quick $5,000 to go back to school. Universities today are the biggest employers in many Congressional districts, and they’re all having to downsize.
My wife teaches public school in Montgomery County, Md., where more and more teachers can’t afford to buy homes near the schools where they teach, and now have long, dirty commutes from distant suburbs. One of the smartest stimulus moves we could make would be to eliminate federal income taxes on all public schoolteachers so more talented people would choose these careers. I’d also double the salaries of all highly qualified math and science teachers, staple green cards to the diplomas of foreign students who graduate from any U.S. university in math or science — instead of subsidizing their educations and then sending them home — and offer full scholarships to needy students who want to go to a public university or community college for the next four years.
J.F.K. took us to the moon. Let B.H.O. take America back to school.
But that will take time. There’s simply no shortcut for a stimulus that stimulates minds not just salaries. “You can bail out a bank; you can’t bail out a generation,” says the great American inventor, Dean Kamen, who has designed everything from the Segway to artificial limbs. “You can print money, but you can’t print knowledge. It takes 12 years.”
Sure, we’ll waste some money doing that. That will happen with bridges, too. But a bridge is just a bridge. Once it’s up, it stops stimulating. A student who normally would not be interested in science but gets stimulated by a better teacher or more exposure to a lab, or a scientist who gets the funding for new research, is potentially the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They create good jobs for years. Perhaps more bridges can bail us out of a depression, but only more Bills and Steves can bail us into prosperity.