Do you wonder what is wrong with Math in America? Niki Hayes documented the criminal history of it in her book.
From the author…
Dedicated to my parents, Harold and Sara Smith, common sense folks who modeled good teaching, and to my Kansas cousin Jeananne Blakely, who gives unceasing support for my efforts.
POST UPDATED: Common Core Math Vs. Saxon Math for grades one, two, and three http://t.co/RHvYQU6yWf @JennyHatch #StopCommonCore, #CommonCore
— Jenny Marie Hatch (@JennyHatch) March 14, 2014
UPDATE: The Homeschool Legal Defense Association published their Common Core Documentary on You Tube.
Here it is:
I was contacted last week by Dad Blogger and New Homeschooling Father Scott Suler. He has been aware of the Math Wars and the various claims made by both sides about faulty Math Curriculum. He read a couple of my Math Posts and contacted me about his conversation with the author of the middle school Saxon Math textbooks Stephen Hake.
He contacted Stephen Hake first hand and engaged him in a Q and A email conversation. The four blog entries detailing their email chat are located on Scotts Blog Homeschooling Odyssey.
To read this conversation click HERE, HERE, HERE, AND HERE!
The most relevant portion of Scott and Stephens conversation to parents today was the first response from Stephen in Part one of Scotts Blog Posts:
“To underscore the care I take with the content, I will speaking personally. The greatest satisfaction I have as a Saxon author is that parents choose Saxon Math for their children. Homeschool parents have trust us for 30 years. I take that trust very seriously. I began writing this program for my own children, and now my grandchildren are using the program. I am certainly not going to compromise their education. So homeschool parents can continue to trust us.
Now for a longer version: I first made contact with John Saxon in 1983 after I began using his first-printing Algebra 1 textbook with a class of 8th grade students I was teaching. His book was remarkably similar in style to the method I had settled upon for my students. I fact, I had written curriculum that teachers were using in my school district at the 4th, 5th, and 6th grade levels. John Saxon and I agreed to merge our efforts. John wrote the books Algebra 1/2 and up, while I wrote manuscripts for Math 54, Math 65, Math 76, and Math 87. The manuscripts I wrote followed the format John Saxon used for his high school books, and the content was based on my own teaching experience.
When John Saxon would receive one of my manuscripts, he would review it, mark it for editorial changes, and then we would meet to go over his suggestions. We saw eye-to-eye on nearly everything, and on the rare occasions when we did not completely agree, he would consent to my decision, since I had experience at that level. In other words, he acknowledged me as lead author.
Over the years, states have required more content in math courses. For example, math textbooks now include more content in statistics, probability, and problem-solving. Additionally, states require copyright dates to remain current. Therefore, every six or seven years publishers create new editions. When the time came to revise the Saxon Math textbooks, we did not remove content. We usually added a few lessons, and we would strengthen the existing content. Although we added pages to the books over the years, we also made the books better.
Saxon Homeschool does not directly sell the newest editions of the books, entitled Intermediate 3, 4, 5 and Courses 1, 2, 3. However, the publisher sells these editions to schools, and sometimes people post these books on eBay. They are good books. Although these editions are generally not available to homeschool customers, is no reason to avoid them. Some parents have asked about Saxon Math and Common Core. The most recent editions of Saxon Math were created before the Common Core State Standards were created.
This email does not address the Saxon high school books. If you would like information about the new high school books or my perspective on Common Core, let me know, and I will respond in a separate email.
Best regards,
Stephen Hake”
More parents are jumping on the bandwagon questioning Common Core Math.
Last night a post by a Father was whipping around Facebook. The Dad, Daniel Bongino is running for Congress in Maryland and he said this:
“Like many of you, I am a parent who is passionate about my child’s education in an increasingly competitive and unforgiving global economy.
Having stated that, I cannot condemn the Common Core in strong enough terms. Look at the picture I have attached to this post. I gave my daughter a relatively easy long-division problem to do today, in an attempt to gauge her progress, and this is what she gave back to me.
This is completely unacceptable. How is it that we are replacing a time-tested, efficient method of long-division with an absurd, multi-step process that not only confuses the students, but the parents too?
Compounding the Common Core disaster is the fact that in my daughter’s last school year she was taught the older, more effective method of long-division and is now completely confused.
Friends, all politics are local and it gets no more local than your kitchen table. Fight back against the Common Core, and do it quickly, by calling and emailing your local, state, and federal elected officials.
This is not a partisan issue. Your child’s education is suffering whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. Every second we lose is another second our kids are being exposed to a third-rate curriculum in a first-world economy. Count on me as an ally in this fight.
-Dan”
I really am amazed that two busy Fathers would slow down their lives enough to attempt to get the facts in this matter. The Math Wars continue on…
I wish I trusted the schools enough to know that if I sent Ben to Middle School next year nobody would be messing with his mind. I am not a math teacher, not trained in education or educrat pedagogy. I am angry that I have to spend my precious time teaching my son Math when the whole infrastructure uses my tax dollars to train teachers and administrators, build the schools, and buy the textbooks. If the world was not turned completely upsidedown we would not have had to spend thousands of dollars of our precious resources from our family budget buying curriculum to fill in the gaps where the public schools are spectacularly failing.
These Saxon Text Books are as important to me as the scriptures we read with our children every day. We keep them on a special shelf in our living room and they are treated like the treasures that they are. Every day that Ben and I sit down to work on his daily math lesson I feel a sense of satisfaction that we are beating back against the insanity that is Math Education in America, but there are about ten thousands things I would RATHER be doing with my time than playing the part of Math Teacher.
Not every parent has the time, resources, gumption, and desire to take on the intimidating task of teaching middle school and high school math to a child. And it is for them that I continue to write and yell.
It we don’t dump the Common Core mess right in the toilet where it belongs a huge group of American School Children are going to grow up believing they are idiots. I pray we can get the gumption to fight back against Jeb Bush and Bill Gates and say “no, you are not going to dumb down yet another generation of children!”
I asked Benjamin to let me video tape him describing the various textbooks we use for Homeschool…enjoy!
BY RAYMOND JOHNSON | PUBLISHED MAY 6, 2013
I have had an interesting chat this past week with one of the Pearson curriculum developers in the comment section tied to the post.
Jenny Hatch says:
May 7, 2013 at 4:20 pm
Common core proponents are yelling they are just offering standards to school boards and parents, not curriculum.
When the big progressive corporate powers that be bought out all of the Independent Math Curriculum Companies, they made certain to dumb them all down knowing that when curriculum committees went looking for a “world class” Math book, it really did not matter which one was chosen, because they all stunk.
Heads they win, Tails we lose…Suckas!
Here is what they did to Saxon Math:
Reply
Bowen Kerins says:
May 7, 2013 at 8:24 pm
Working for an Independent Math Curriculum Company, I can assure you that we have not all been bought out, nor have we been dumbed down. Have a look sometime… uh… suckas?
Your claim that “all serious Mathematicians agree, the original SAXON Math curriculum, especially the second edition, has no equal, and is the best in the marketplace” is far from accurate.
Reply
Jenny Hatch says:
May 7, 2013 at 9:53 pm
Hey Bowen,
Does your excellent, world class, bar none the best on the planet Math Curriculum have an accompanying “Remedial” program tied to it?
So that when the younguns’ use your materials approximately 33 1/2 % of the children need a Math Specialist and “Special” curriculum?
#HowTheGameIsPlayed
The thing is all of you specialists need to understand that a group of people are very much aware of the tactics beings used to dumb down American Children and we are not going to sit quietly down and just let this monstrosity percolate in the schools without trying to expose the frauds.
You need to “Simma Down”, taka a chill pill, and decide if you want to be a part of the problem or of the solution…
Jenny Hatch
Homeschooling Mom and General Rabble Rouser about #CommonCore
Reply
Bowen Kerins says:
May 8, 2013 at 8:20 pm
I don’t see myself as a specialist, I see myself as a former high school teacher who started writing books because I thought we could make something better than what existed. (That appears to be the same biography as Mr. Saxon.)
Today I spent the entire day working with math teachers in Lawrence, MA as they begin implementing a schoolwide curriculum at their high school for the first time in many years, and I am proud that they will be using our program, CME Project. We have previously shown success (in student achievement, efficacy, in standardized testing) in many other cities. CME Project is written by teachers with over 100 years of combined classroom experience, funded by the National Science Foundation, and field-tested for five years before publishing. Some of the work in CME Project was incorporated into the Common Core State Standards, particularly the Standards for Mathematical Practice intended to highlight eight deep goals of K-12 mathematics, such as persistent problem-solving, using precise language, and generalizing from repeated reasoning.
Our materials are built with a low-threshold, high-ceiling approach so that all … uhh, younguns’? … can learn and succeed. Our curriculum has very high standards, and students rise to meet those standards. Students learn math by working on math problems — good problems, connected to one another, with both short-term and long-term goals.
Our program comes with support for students who enter our curriculum below grade level, while continuing to ask those students to take on work at level. We have consistently found that students can and will take on challenging mathematical tasks if they are given the opportunity to work on them, gaining self-efficacy and perseverance through work.
None of this happens without high-quality teachers doing their work. I will always be grateful for the great work of these professionals. It’s an honor to work with teachers and students around the country, and a privilege to see our work succeeding in measurable ways.
However, it may instead be true that I am destroying America and am a complete fraud who needs to simmer down. I suggest you read through our curriculum, talk to teachers who use it, and get a sense of what we wrote and why we wrote it. The chance of this happening may be less than “approximately 33 1/2%” — seriously, why didn’t you just say “approximately one-third” — but I’m always glad to defend our work. Thanks for reading!
Reply
Jenny Hatch says:
May 9, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Bowen,
Thanks for explaining what you do.
I appreciate the overview mostly because Pearson has been fingered as the company with the most at stake in the Common Core rollout.
As a parent my biggest issue with the reading and math curriculums is the recidivism of the various companies.
And really, who can blame them with all that lovely money flowing in. Taxpayer money mostly.
My own research and frankly, national test scores, have proven year after year after year that nothing has changed, children are still being taught with materials DESIGNED to ensure that ONE THIRD of them will need remediation in math and reading.
With so many careers on the line and so much cash to be pumped into the glory hole of the cash cow that is American Education, WHO has the will to reform this glutonous system???
I think of the curriculum companies the same way I think of the Pharma companies who run Medicine.
When the business model DEPENDS on a high percentage of sickness and educational failure…well, I just do NOT believe Taxpayers should be funding this madness.
If we had a truly competitive private sector in education and medicine, with no taxpayer slush fund, everyone would be amazed to watch how quickly these sick systems of education and medicine reformed themselves.
But when every Johnnie and Susie has ten grand tucked away in their backpack every year to be doled out to whoever is smart enough to GO FOR THE GOLD, and when Johnnie and Susie have twenty grand per year if someone can just manage to get them labeled reading or math challenged…
Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or even a Math specialist, (sorry, teacher) to crunch them numbers…
Happy Trails!
Jenny Hatch
And today over at the Utahns against Common Core Blog a devastating Math Post outlined the stark difference between Common Core approved Math Textbooks and Saxon Math.
Here is a link to the Post Titled STEM is Dead in Utah Courtesy of the usoe
And an excerpt from Oak Nortons Post:
Several years ago I was involved in what has been called “The Math Wars”. Alpine School District had quit teaching the times tables, long division, and some other basic math skills, to children under the promise that a constructivist (ie. children need to construct their own knowledge) approach to math would deepen their skills. This was an abominable failure. Even at BYU where 2 math education professors got permission (by someone over the math department’s dead body) to teach a class of honors calculus to freshmen with this method. The result was a disaster. Honors calculus students measuring Dixie Cups with rulers while regular students were learning how to integrate. Predictably to everyone but those 2 professors teaching the constructivist class, their students scored below all 17 sections of non-honors calculus on the final exam. Their final defeat? Blame it on the test writer who had been creating the same test from the same objectives for years…
Now the big lie. Current research says there are NO studies that support constructivism. Dr. Jim Milgram, Stanford math professor who has been and may still currently be the only educator invited to serve on NASA’s advisory board, noted that if constructivist math were a success, NASA would be looking for students that went through that pedagogy. The fact is, BYU’s math education professors’ failure is typical of constructivist programs.
There is only one conclusion. Following the USOE’s math recommendations will kill STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) initiatives. All you business leaders and technology oriented professionals supporting Common Core are going to be in for a rude awakening as this machine destroys love of math, destroys math skills, and destroys any edge Utah has for technology…unless…
Utah must drop Common Core and restore local control. The USOE is hell-bent on constructivism and unless there is a major personnel change at the USOE, it’s going to rest on the shoulders of parents to take their children’s education into their own hands (literally), and leave those who can’t get the support at home to drown in fuzzy math.
In 2006 or so, Brett Moulding, state curriculum director at the USOE invited me to his office to ask a simple question. “Oak, you’re a parent who is very involved in your children’s education. How can we replicate that to other parents?”
“Easy,” I replied. “Just implement Investigations math statewide and you’ll have all the parental involvement you can handle.”
True story. I just had no idea they were going to take my suggestion literally. Parents, you may seriously want to consider The Great Escape…Homeschooling.
More HERE
