"I traveled to Norway in April, disillusioned after nine years of reporting on child care in the U.S., where parents often pay exorbitant sums for care that comes with no guarantee of quality and relies on underpaid workers. I was eager to see a country that prioritizes child care and generously subsidizes that system, two things that feel wholly out of reach in the United States. "
In Norway, early childhood education is a national priority, enshrined in law.
https://hechingerreport.org/norway-law-decrees-let-childhood-be-childhood/
Last April, an email went out to families in the Troy School District outside Detroit. Signed by unnamed “concerned Troy parents,” it said that a district proposal to end “basic” and “honors” math classes for sixth and seventh graders was part of a longer-term district plan to completely abolish honors classes in all of its schools.
Superintendent Richard Machesky and his team were stunned. The district was indeed proposing to merge separate sixth- and seventh-grade math tracks into what it said would be a single, rigorous pathway emphasizing pre-algebra skills. In eighth grade, students could opt for Eighth Grade Math or Algebra I. But the district had no plans for changes to other grades, much less to do away with high school honors classes.
It’s part of the skirmish over “detracking,” or eliminating the sorting of kids by perceived ability into separate math classes. Since the mid-1980s, some education experts have supported such moves, citing research showing that tracking primarily serves as a marker of race or class, as Black and Hispanic students, and those from lower-income families, are steered into lower-track classes at disproportionate rates. In the last 15 years, a handful of school districts around the country have eliminated some tracked math classes.
This story was written by The Hechinger Report and co-published with Bridge Michigan and KQED.
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In Jodie Murphy’s kindergarten class, math lessons go beyond the basics of counting and recognizing numbers.
On a recent morning, the children used plastic red and yellow dots for a counting exercise: One student tossed the coin-sized dots onto a cookie sheet while another hid her eyes. The second student then opened her eyes, counted up the dots and picked the corresponding number from a stack of cards.
The dots showed up again a few minutes later in a more complex task. Murphy set a two-minute timer, and students counted as many dot arrays as they could, adding or taking away dots to match a corresponding written number. Four dots next to a printed number 6, for example, meant that students had to draw in two extra dots — an important precursor to learning addition.
Kindergarten may be math’s most important year — it lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship between number and quantity and helps develop “number sense,” or how numbers relate to each other, experts and researchers say.
But too often teachers spend that crucial year reinforcing basic information students may already know. Research shows that many kindergarteners learn early on how to count and recognize basic shapes — two areas that make up the majority of kindergarten math content. Though basic math content is crucial for students who begin school with little math knowledge, a growing body of research argues more comprehensive kindergarten math instruction that moves beyond counting could help more students become successful in math later on.
This story was written by The Hechinger Report and co-published with The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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📲 Read the full story: https://hechingerreport.org/kindergarten-math-is-often-too-basic-heres-why-thats-a-problem/
✍️: Holly Korbey/The Hechinger
Math is a giant hurdle for most community college students pursuing welding and other career and technical degrees. About a dozen years ago, the administration at Linn-Benton Community College looked at their data and found that many students in career and technical education, or CTE, were getting most of the way toward a degree but were stopped by a math course. That’s not unusual: Up to 60 percent of students entering community college are unprepared for college-level work, and the subject they most often need help with is math.
The college asked the math department to design courses tailored to those students, starting with its welding, culinary arts and criminal justice programs. The first of those, math for welders, rolled out in 2013.
More than a decade later, welding department instructors say that math for welders has had a huge impact on student performance. Two years ago, Linn-Benton asked Lopez to design a similar course for its automotive technology program; they began to offer that course last fall.
Read more: https://hechingerreport.org/math-ends-the-education-careers-of-thousands-of-community-college-students-a-few-schools-are-trying-something-new/
If a student excels at word problems in math, it’s a good sign that they’re generally excelling at school. But most experts and many educators agree that too many schools are teaching word problems poorly, particularly in the elementary grades.
In a small but growing number of classrooms, teachers are working to change that.
Read more: https://hechingerreport.org/why-schools-are-teaching-math-word-problems-all-wrong/
