"U.S. Math Tests Find Scant Gains Across New York"

So the NY Times reported this morning: the 4th and 8th graders did not make great progress in New York over the last two years, they did no better, perhaps worse, based on the federal tests, despite the fact that the state's tests show great progress. Diane Ravitch calls it fraud.

"Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers’ union, said the federal results showed that the state tests were not reliable yardsticks. 'We’ve designed a school system that is just test-taking prep, and we have teachers saying, ‘I know I am not teaching children what they need to learn,’ ' he said."

This comes as especially interesting news after my initial interview with one of the biggest textbook publishers yesterday for a job creating "Problem sets" for their online history textbooks. To me the job has potential, especially if a decade from now we are closer to the "Teaching machines" of 1950s science fiction that will give our kids individualized, supportive, engaging education in a range of subjects. Typically, in a good short story from the era, the school day took an hour of teaching or perhaps was done while the child slept -- always by a kind and patient machine.

So that's what the job would be, programming the machine. The most delicious part is that it pays much better than being a member of the faculty at SSC. Of course the goal now is merely to "support teaching" but there's no reason to believe that we would stop there. We've squeezed the costs out of all sorts of things, from switchboards to assembly lines by replacing people with machines, why not the university as well? Once we're done with that we could replace mothers with machines and free the moms for work. What work they would actually do, I don't know.

MCAS Hits Home, or, What does Molly have against Nuclear Submarines?

A bit of a digression from higher ed this time to comment on the recent report of the state of Massachusetts on my eldest daughter's reading comprehension ability, which apparently is not up to snuff as far as they're concerned. Fortunately, the interweb now allows the interested parent to see the actual questions and reading assignments on which this assessment is based. It turns out that there were 12 multiple choice questions (and one short answer question but we cannot see the answer to that one). She got the first 8 right. These were on a reading about a boy getting milk in the snow.

She got one of the next 4 questions right, in other words, as well as a chimp who couldn't read might have done. This reading was on the launch of the nuclear submarine Nautilus. I can only assume that Molly doesn't like subs. I have to ask: what is our school doing to bridge the gender gap and ensure that little girls are as intrigued about Cold-War submarine history as little boys? I can only hope they are on the case.