We Can't Teach Them If They Don't Come To School

"Chronic absenteeism" means a student has missed more than 10% of the school days in a year.  This chart shows chronic absenteeism rates of several districts in the Sacramento area:

This data is a year old now.  I'd love to know if there's been any "recovery" in the years since the 'rona, but still, it amazes me that in almost half of those districts, a full third of students are chronically absent.

Update, 8/16/23:  It's not just the Sacramento area, or course:

Students across the U.S. have been chronically absent in record-high numbers after the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study from Stanford Research shows. 

More than 25% of students were classified as chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year because they had missed at least 10% of the school year. Comparatively, before the pandemic, only 15% of students had such high levels of absenteeism, the study noted.

Is the veneer of civilization so thin that the school shutdowns of 2-3 years ago continue to wreak so much damage?  It would seem so.

Maybe Getting Old?

My 40-year high school reunion is tomorrow night.  

I'm quite sure I'm older than many of the teachers I had in high school, whom I thought were ancient and had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.  I don't feel that old, but the numbers don't lie!

Believe It Or Not...

Every toilet but one was installed before the work crews left last night.

The parking lot expansion isn't done, but as lot of kids haven't gotten their licenses yet so early in the school year, it didn't affect us.  It's supposed to be done next week.

We still don't have books.  Well, we have books, but there stacked floor to ceiling in our book room until we get someone in there to put them into our system and check them out to students.  Most of my classes' textbooks are available online after students complete a signup process, maybe I'll just start classes normally on Monday and just expect them to look up the books on the web site until we can get them issued.

My students who are dual-enrolled in a local community college class are largely clueless about what to do, they haven't heard from the college at all.  Even our counselors can't get through to the dual-enrollment office at the college, it seems they're a little behind schedule in enrolling our students.  Fortunately the college classes don't begin until a week from Monday, so there's still some time.

As is always the case on the first day of school, my students were friendly and respectful.  I'll do my part to keep them that way as long as possible!

I warned all of them, though:  do not mess with the freshmen.  The freshmen are a protected class, I am looking out for them.  After all, we have something in common--when they graduate, I graduate.  Only 4 years left for me!

Today was the first day of school for students.  Tomorrow is our first dance and first football game!  Only supposed to get to the low 90s tomorrow, but into the 100s starting Monday.  School should not start this early in August.

Ready Or Not, Here I Come

Students show up tomorrow.

Will the toilets be installed?  Will the parking lot resurfacing be completed?  When will we have a clerk to issue textbooks? (Our book room is currently floor to ceiling with boxes of new textbooks.)

Only The Shadow knows!

I was awake at 4am today and couldn't go back to sleep so I got to work extra early.  I'm exhausted now, hopefully I'll get a good night's sleep in order to face the day on a most positive note.

Start of the School Year

Can you believe that I've already been back to work, and our students start on Thursday?  It's so early!

It's already turning out to be an "interesting" start to the new year.  Students haven't been able to pick up textbooks yet, and there are as yet no teacher books for some of our newly-adopted math books.  By far the wildest challenge, though, is our lack of bathrooms.  Specifically, toilets.

Last spring our school got all new matching furniture.  Over the summer, among other projects, every classroom was to get carpeting, and other areas (staff lounges, cafeteria, restrooms) got new flooring.  To put in new flooring, though, toilets had to be removed.  As of today the vast majority of them had not been replaced--and as I said, almost 2000 students show up Thursday.

You can see why the sentiment "may you live in interesting times" was intended to be a curse.

Memory

Human memory is a curious thing.  

It seems like every day now I struggle at least once to find a word that's on the tip of my tongue.  Then there are these two anecdotes:

Last Saturday night I saw Styx in concert.  That got me to thinking about the Styx album I won from a local now-defunct radio station, and one of the songs on that album that I played so often that the grooves in the record probably simulated the Grand Canyon.  Anyway, it took me awhile to recall even the title of that song, which was not a big hit, and I couldn't remember the lyrics.  So, I headed over to YouTube and was almost immediately found that song.  It had been over 40 years since I heard that song, but at the first note I started singing along, recalling the words as if I'd read them over breakfast.  (Aside: I wonder what ever happened to all my records from high school?  I have so few remaining.)

Today was my first day back at work since school got out in June.  Over the weekend I tried but couldn't remember the combination to the lock I use to secure the storage closet in my classroom.  How would I get in there?  As soon as I walked up to the closet, though, and held the lock in my hand, I just started spinning the dial to the right numbers without even thinking about it.

Human memory is a curious thing.

M/V Columbus

In the summer of 2018 I sailed on the M/V Columbus, of the British line Cruise and Maritime Voyages (CMV).  It was a beautiful ship, here are some pictures of her in those happier days:

As I said, a beautiful ship in her prime.  It was an enjoyable cruise from Amsterdam to Gibraltar to the Canaries to Madeira to Lisbon to London.  Two weeks, as I recall.

Well, she's not so beautiful these days.  Here's what she's looked like more recently, after being sent to a scrap yard in India after CMV went under because of the 'rona:

 Ship and aircraft boneyards seem like such a waste to me.

Me, 100%

After You've Taken One Objective, Advance To The Next

From Students For Fair Admissions, the group that brought the end of affirmative action in higher education:

Were you rejected from West Point?
Or the Naval Academy or the Air Force Academy?

It may be because you’re the wrong race.

Or are you a high school senior and plan to apply to any of these service academies?

Gaining admission to West Point is tough. Not only must an applicant have superior academic accomplishments, one must be in excellent physical shape, and receive an appointment from most often a U.S. senator or member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

But West Point, as well as the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy, uses an applicant’s race and ethnicity as a factor in admissions. That’s unfair and unconstitutional.

We are Students for Fair Admissions—the membership group that recently won a major Supreme Court victory in our lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. You can read our press release about the Supreme Court opinion here.

We are committed to ending these practices at America’s military service academies.  link

The Harvard/UNC ruling specifically exempts the military academies from the prohibition against affirmative action.

There's Hope In Math

I never thought the "woke" crap would hit the hard sciences, and boy was I naive.  At least there's a little bit of pushback:

Faculty members in the University of California (UC) system have begun to speak out against their campuses’ adoption of lower math standards in order to bolster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The controversy surrounds a policy enacted by a UC committee in 2020, which changed the admissions requirements for high school applicants in order "to expand course offerings beyond the traditional sequence of math courses that may lead students into the ‘race to calculus,’ to be more inclusive of new and innovative advanced math courses (e.g., data science), and to address equity issues.” 

UC faculty have initiated “staging a behind-the-scenes protest” over the data science classes now being permitted, claiming that they do not prepare students for the rigor of STEM fields, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

“Giving high-school students the idea that it is OK to skimp on their math education is very dangerous,” read a letter from the UC Santa Barbara physics department earlier this year. “Such students will have their career choices severely curtailed, at an early age, and perhaps without even realizing it.”

Hear hear.

Skiplagging

I've encountered this term a lot recently.  Some people do it it save money on a flight, but for reasons I can't quite understand the airlines hate it.  Part of the reason it doesn't sit right with me is because it seems to violate a principle of mathematics:

Skiplagging, also known as "hidden city" ticketing , involves booking a one-stop flight with the intention of "skipping" the second leg and getting off in the layover city. Simply, it's booking a flight from Airport A to Airport C and getting off at a layover at Airport B.

People can save hundreds of dollars doing this because a nonstop flight is more expensive than booking one with a layover in the intended-destination city.

However, airlines have been trying to cut down on this travel hack and haven't shied away from punishing passengers who get caught , including canceling the return flights of those who skiplagged on their outbound journeys.

And it's only possible because airfares don't follow one of the most intuitive rules in math.

One of the most basic laws of geometry is called the "triangle inequality." If you're trying to measure the distance between points , one of the basic rules is that the distance between two points has to be less than or equal to the distance from your first point to some other point and then back to your original second point.

The inequality gets its name from how triangles work in classic plane geometry. If you have a triangle, the sum of the length of any two sides of that triangle is bigger than the length of the third side.

We might expect airline fares to more or less follow this rule and act as a distance metric between cities. Between fuel, maintenance, and crew pay, it should cost more to fly a plane from New York to Amsterdam, followed by a leg from Amsterdam to London, than it would to fly the plane from New York to Amsterdam. That cost difference should be reflected in the price of tickets between the three cities.

But that's clearly not always the case, and that violation of the triangle inequality is what makes skiplagging possible.

Why do airlines do this? 

The math and science writer Brian Hayes came up with a possible explanation for this triangle-inequality-violating phenomenon in a 2013 blog post. He wrote that the discrepancy could come from the direct flight being in much higher demand than the layover flight, which he said could lead airlines to charge more for the nonstop. And the price of New York to Amsterdam to London is competing with the price of New York to London direct, not New York to Amsterdam. 

That still doesn't explain it sufficiently in my eyes. 

For the most part I don't travel without a checked bag, so skiplagging isn't something that would work for me anyway and thus I won't be doing it.  However, I'd really like to have someone truly in the know, someone who prices flights for me, explain why it's a problem worth penalizing.

The Library

I went to my local public library today.  It had been many years since I've been there, and things were quite different.

It's a small thing that the location of the circulation desk had moved.  What really surprised me was the lack of books!  When I went to that library as a teenager, it was crammed with books and reference materials and newspapers and the like.  Now there are very few books on the shelves, and not one but two apps that can be used to download ebooks or audiobooks.  I noticed they have "my series" in one of the apps, and since I've already bought the first 8 of the 20-book series, I think I'll save the rest of my money.

So it seems that the library is now a place for "information" rather than for "books", and that's ok.  What really shocked me was the other things you could borrow from the library.  Power tools and a weed eater?  Really?  That's an odd library to me!

I should probably go there more often.  Not only was it sort of fun learning what a 2020's library is and does, I can probably save a few dollars on things I'd otherwise buy.

Who Should See Dept of Education Data?

They wouldn't have such gag clauses, and wouldn't sue people for violating such gag clauses, if they weren't trying to hide something:

The California Department of Education has threatened to sue two prominent Stanford University education professors to prevent them from testifying in a lawsuit against the department -- actions the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California calls an attempt to muzzle them.

The ACLU, in turn, is threatening a lawsuit of its own -- against CDE for infringing their and other researchers' First Amendment rights.

Observers say the dispute has the potential to limit who conducts education research in California and what they are able to study because CDE controls the sharing of data that is not available to the public.

At issue is a restriction that CDE requires researchers to sign as a condition for their gaining access to nonpublic K-12 data. The clause, which CDE is interpreting broadly, prohibits the researcher from participating in any litigation against the department, even in cases unrelated to the research they were doing through CDE.

"It keeps education researchers from weighing in on the side of parties who are adverse to the California Department of Education. So it's really skewing the information and expertise that can come into courts," said Alyssa Morones, an ACLU attorney involved with the case. "Individuals and students seeking to vindicate their rights no longer will have access to these education experts, and the court can no longer hear what they have to say"...

"What are state officials afraid of?" (Attorney) Jacobs said. "That their performance in running the school system during the pandemic in fact aggravated the achievement gap? That notwithstanding their protestations, they haven't done enough to address that problem?"

CDE declined to comment on the need for the litigation ban in data contracts or its threats and actions against Dee or Reardon. Researchers told EdSource they were unaware of similar prohibitions in other states, but EdSource could not verify that.

I have to believe that such a lawsuit against the CDE would be a slam dunk; at least, it would be in probably any other state.

Why Students Don't Perform Well

You can poor millions into a school, provide all sorts of services, but if you're not changing what happens at home, it's probably for naught (with a few unique exceptions here and there around the country):

The inaugural class of third graders at the LeBron James-supported I Promise School in Akron will soon start eighth grade, and, for each of the last three school years, none of those students have scored “proficient” in Ohio’s math proficiency test.

That fact was alarming to some Akron Board of Education members who listened to an update during their meeting Monday on the school’s progress.

Meanwhile, the school — which, by design, only takes students who are two or more years behind grade level — was placed on a state academic watchlist for schools flagged for “Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI)." To be added to the watchlist, at least one of the schools' student subgroup’s performance must be in the lowest 5% of schools in the state. At I Promise, Black students and students with disabilities meet that criteria.

The school is 60% Black and 28% of the 554 students have disabilities.

No doubt they took some very difficult students, and on some measures the students have shown improvement: 

Stephanie Davis, who became principal in June, struck a hopeful tone in a statement provided by the LeBron James Family Foundation. She pointed to students’ “i-Ready” scores, which show students’ mastery of topics separate from tests.

“Our students have not yet met the grade-level mastery mark but they are demonstrating growth based on (i-Ready) scores,” she said. “Of our incoming 8th graders, 32% met their annual typical growth in reading while 11% met their stretch goal for the year. Despite not mastering the grade-level standards, 42% of students demonstrated growth in i-Ready math across their 7th-grade school year.

“When working with students who are achieving below grade level, growth is as important as a measure of progress as proficiency. And the type of growth that is important to us is not made overnight," she concluded. "It takes time.”

Growth is good, but how much time do you need?  And why did less than half grow sufficiently?  Extra millions have been sunk into these students over the past 5 years without appropriate growth and achievement. 

So who are the lefties gonna blame here?  Racist teachers?  Not enough money?  Republicans?  Not enough support?  Read the article for how much extra support was provided by LeBron James and his foundation.

Here's how you know the school isn't going to improve much this year:

He added that next steps include more professional development and training for teachers, along with a deeper focus on analyzing data and what best teaching practices might be.

Absent evidence that the teachers absolutely suck, focusing on teachers as a whole is not going to give you any bang for the buck.  Sure, get rid of those everyone knows suck, but then what?  Until you can change what goes on at home, most of your efforts will fail.  It's so obvious, but no one wants to admit it for two reasons:

1. because it eliminates the possibility of a silver bullet to fix everything, and
2. because it takes the focus away from the easy target of teachers and puts it on the unpopular backs of the parents.

Too many of those students are doomed to academic distress, and there's no political or social will to fix the problem.  Sad.

Update:  Remember what happened in Kansas City?

School reformers rejoiced when Federal District Judge Russell Clark took control of the district in ’85. He ruled it was unconstitutionally segregated, with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.

To bring the district into compliance. the judge ordered it and the state over the next 12 years to spend nearly $2 billion to build more schools, renovate old ones, integrate classrooms and bring student test scores up to national norms.

But when the judge finally took himself off the case last year (1997), there was little to show academically for all that money. Although the district’s 37,000 mostly minority students enjoyed some of the best‐​funded school facilities in the country, student performance hadn’t improved.

It was a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for backers of vastly increased funding for public schools...

For decades, critics of excess spending for public schools had said, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” To which educators and public school advocates replied, “No one’s ever tried.”

Kansas City settles the argument. Judge Clark invited the district to “dream.” Forget about cost, he said. He urged administrators to let their imaginations soar and assemble a list of everything they might possibly need to boost the achievement of inner‐​city blacks. Using the extraordinary powers granted judges in desegregation cases, Clark said he would find a way to pay for it...

For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three‐​grade‐​level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down...

Of course, the district’s biggest problems weren’t just administrative. The ideological biases of local educators, politicians and Judge Clark against accountability made them reject solutions that might have worked — merit pay for teachers, penalties for failure or vouchers for private schools.

Schools can only do so much in 6-7 hours a day; if what happens outside of school doesn't change, what happens inside of school won't change.  Sure, there are Joe Clark and Jaime Escalante and Bob Moses superheroes, who can have an impact here and there, but if you expect every public school teacher to be a superhero, you're not being realistic about the problem or the solution. And you can continue to throw money at the schools--I love it when I get a pay raise--but if you think that by itself is going to improve student achievement, I will politely ask to see your supporting data.

Music Trivia: R

All of these songs have one-word titles that begin with the letter R.  How many can you get?

1.  This late-70s Styx hit was written by Tommy Shaw, but fellow guitarist JY played the guitar solo on it.

2.  This mid-70s Fleetwood Mac song cemented Stevie Nicks' witchy persona.

3.  This late-70s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers hit reached #15 on the Billboard charts and, according to Wikipedia, "is widely regarded as one of Petty's best songs."

4.  This late-90s Collective Soul hit was from their platinum-certified 4th album. 

5.  This early-90s Black Crowes hit is said to be about the war on drugs.

Is Diversity Good For Higher Education Students, Or Not?

link

How I Spent My Evening With Friends

 

This was after breakfast, an escape room, and axe-throwing with them.  Great day!

Higher Education Priority

Seen on Instagram today:

Controversial thesis:  If the highest paid person in your university or college is the basketball coach or the football coach, then it is not a university, it is a sporting franchise with a side hustle in tertiary education.

Not a controversial thesis here at RotLC.  As I've said plenty of times, let the NFL and NBA fund their own farm teams.

Injustices

One of the worst injustices that currently happens in Western jurisprudence is wrongly convicting someone of a crime and locking them up.  That's why I'm such a fan of The Innocence Project.

Yes, this story happened in Britain, but is it so far-fetched that you cannot see it happening in the USA?

A British man who spent 17 years behind bars after being wrongly convicted of rape may owe the U.K. Prison Service thousands of pounds for "board and lodging," the Manchester Evening News reported.

Andy Malkinson, 57, was found guilty in 2003 of raping a woman in Salford, England. This week, a Court of Appeal exonerated him and ruled that DNA evidence proved another man was responsible.

Malkinson is set to receive financial compensation for his wrongful conviction, but the Ministry of Justice can take out a portion of the money and give it to the Prison Service because it provided food and shelter during his stay.

Malkinson said the government implemented the archaic rule after the Prison Service lobbied for the change in the early 2000s.

"The result is that even if you fight tooth and nail and gain compensation, you then have to pay the prison service a large chunk of that for so-called 'board and lodgings', which is so abhorrent to me," Malkinson told BBC 4. "I am sickened by it."

As well he should be.  

The article continues by stating that such payments are determined on a case-by-case basis and he may well pay nothing, but such a law is still an abomination.  When society locks up a person, that person is in "custody"--which means "care", which means society pays for room and board incurred by the incarceration.  What possible legitimate reason could there by for the stupid law that's rubbing salt in Mr. Malkinson's 17-year-old open wound?

How To Teach Math?

Over at Joanne's blog are two posts about teaching math.  First:

There's no evidence that "trauma-deformed pedagogy" (oops, "informed") helps students learn more, writes Max Eden, an American Enterprise Institute fellow, on Real Clear Education. Yet it's cited in support of California's controversial new math guidelines, which are full of dubious claims. 

"Trauma informed" means educators take into account the fact that some students have led very difficult lives. But how does that affect teaching math...

The study includes no evidence students learned any math -- or that they "healed," writes Eden.

The examples cited would be a good social studies exercise, but they're crappy math.  Let's continue:

Under the California framework, math teachers are supposed to train students to be change agents, writes Bill Evers of the Independent Institute. "The teacher is supposed to highlight 'connections' between math and 'environmental and social justice,'" perhaps by writing an “opinion piece” or “explanatory text.”

As the previous post explains, research shows that's not an effective way to teach math. We don't want kids to learn math, don't we?

If they can't give you good government, they'll give you "woke" government.  If they can't give you good education, they'll give you "woke" education.

An excerpt from the second post:

"Students who spent more time in class solving practice problems on their own and taking quizzes and tests tended to have higher scores in math," the study found. In English, "teachers who allocated more class time to discussions and group work ended up with higher scorers in that subject."

Teachers in both subjects spent little time lecturing. 

Lifting weights is how you get stronger.  Writing is how you become a better writer.  Speaking a language is how you become better at a foreign language.  Playing an instrument is how you get better at playing an instrument.  It's funny that only in math do we throw such principles out, and we do it in the name of a "social justice" that accomplishes exactly the opposite of what its proponents claim they want.