Thanks for the pointer, Delbows. That was a truly depressing article. The one bright spot is that the teacher, Walstein, seems like he is really something special. I wish there were more like him around.
For those who don't have time to read the whole thing, here's the executive summary:
Walstein, "arguably the most highly regarded high school math teacher in the county", teaches in the math and science magnet program at Montgomery Blair H.S. in Silver Spring, MD. He claims that, in their zeal to reduce the achievement gap (one of the directives of NCLB, no?) administrators have ruined the math curriculum in MD. The problem, he claims, is that their strategy has been to dumb down middle school math so that more kids can do well in it. The result is that more kids are taking advanced math earlier, but they leave these classes less prepared than they used to be. This doesn't show up on the test results because the MD state exams are so rudimentary. More kids do well on the exams and the state gets to congratulate itself, but nobody gets a solid foundation in the fundamentals. At least that's what Walstein claims. The administrators, of course, claim that Walstein and his colleagues are just curmudgeons. If it's true that he's such a star teacher though (and the article gives some pretty good evidence) then I'm inclined to believe the boots on the ground.
In this end this all seems like one of those depressing stories about how bureaucracy screws up education. Even NCLB - which I'm no fan of, by the way - has a potentially reasonable motivation. Namely, it wants more kids to learn more. All else being equal, that sounds like a good idea. The problem is in the accounting. If you can make it look like more kids are learning more by dumbing down the tests and then teaching to them, then there's lots of bureaucratic pressure to solve the problem that way. Certainly much easier than actually teaching the kids! So that's what happens. And the resulting curriculum effects the brighter kids too, since the teachers aren't given time to teach the subjects in any depth, even to them.
One more reason why in an ideal world I would home school my kid. Unfortunately, for all the usual reasons, it's not an ideal world.
BB
