Across the nation, kids just hammered through this test. Ready to channel your inner Escalante? From last year’s test: 

Oil is leaking from a pipeline on the surface of a lake and forms an oil slick whose volume increases at a constant rate of 2000 cubic centimeters per minute. The oil slick takes the form of a right circular cylinder with both its radius and height changing with time.  (Note: V=pi*r^2*h)

(a) At the instant when the radius of the oil slick is 100 centimeters and the height is 0.5 centimeter, the radius is increasing at the rate of 2.5 centimeters per minute. At this instant, what is the rate of change of the height of the oil slick with respect to time, in centimeters per minute? 

(b) A recovery device arrives on the scene and begins removing oil. The rate at which oil is removed is 400 (square root of) t  cubic centimeters per minute, where t is the time in minutes since the device began working. Oil continues to leak at the rate of 2000 cubic centimeters per minute. Find the time t when the oil slick reaches its maximum volume. Justify your answer. 

(c) By the time the recovery device began removing oil, 60,000 cubic centimeters of oil had already leaked. Write, but do not evaluate, an expression involving an integral that gives the volume of oil at the time found in part (b). 

—Guestblogger Mike Goldstein

Caroline Hoxby speaks tonight in the Gateway City about her charter lottery research. Q+A from the local paper, including why local charters perform poorly.  

Speaking of which, if you’re a district leader, state official, or charter leader/authorizer wanting a hard-nosed examination of how your random admission lottery winners do versus your lottery losers (for charters or any other public school), the authors of this Boston study hope to do more such studies. Contact Sarah Cohodes.  

—Guestblogger Mike Goldstein

NCTQ and ConnCan team up to study Hartford teacher contract.  News story here, report here.  (Disclosure: I’m on an NCTQ advisory board.)  From the Courant:

There’s a “real disconnect” between student performance and the reviews that teachers get, Keller said.  While Hartford students continue to struggle to catch up to their peers throughout the state, most Hartford teachers are rated as competent and accomplished in performance reviews. The report calls the ratings “inflated,” because only about 1 percent of teachers were rated unsatisfactory in 2007-08.

Many of the recommendations hit a nerve with union representatives, with Johnson calling some of the findings “ridiculous” and “outrageous.”

 —Guestblogger Mike Goldstein

1. Cinco De Mayo empanadas. For all. Vege clearly marked from chicken. All baked by math teacher with helpers. Then birthday cake for bio teacher. Double helixes and green frosting monocytes on top.

2. History teacher talking to a colleague about breakfast. As in: serving a special one to kids. AP test soon. This guy is not easily discouraged. Trying to get the kids who arrive bottom 25th percentile in English as 9th graders to handle AP history as 11th graders. Test smacked our kids upside collective head last 2 years. He could coast and say “they’ve been exposed to rich curriculum.” Not his style. He’s tried a different, essay-heavy approach this year. Which has meant tons of extra grading for him. Will it work?Check back in July.    

3. Extra staff downstairs, covering for the principal. No grumbling. A mix of school leaders and teachers are on the road, Boston to NYC. Hungry for improvement. First visit yesterday was KIPP Infinity. To help organize a union drive. Just kidding! Infinity’s a literacy standout among No Excuses schools. Rockin’ blog here.  

Then off to North Star High. Schools like that have tons of visitors. From USA. From the world. Anyone from nearest low-performing school?  Almost never, they say.  

4. Random note and Dan Willingham’s nightmare: ”While checking over Jarsha’s active reading notes in English tutorial, I noticed that she had only made a single mark on the entire page. She circled the word ‘bacon’ in the article and wrote ‘I <3 U’ beside it.”

—Guestblogger Mike Goldstein

My buddy down the street at Typical Urban High teaches an “Algebra 2 class.” Nobody in his class had passed Algebra 1.  

Can you really teach kids to simplify this 8x³y²z² + 5x²yz³ - 3xyz + 4x²yz³

….when your kids cannot do this y = 3x + 2?

It’s ludicrous.  

Teachers currently have no incentive to push the C, B, and A average kids to dial it by 50% to 200%, which is what they’d need to become legitimately college ready.   

How do we fight coastability?  

1. Yesterday someone had the really cool suggestion that states publish each high school’s COLLEGE success rates as well as high school completion rates (particularly for urban schools).  

That would balance the state’s interest in two quite different high school goals. One is completion for the half inclined drop out.  The other—usually given short shrift—is legit college readiness for the half who don’t. Great idea. Let’s build this bad boy out.

2. AP Jay’s on target.  

3. College leaders and profs need to speak up.  Don’t be so a-scared.  

Go to XYZ High. Meet with the kids, parents, teachers.  Say “At our U, we’ve had 35 XYZ kids in recent years.  All had B averages at XYZ.  Only 8 are on track to graduate from the U.  Fourteen have already dropped out with low grades. Kids, you need to study about 2 or 3 times harder at XYZ; teachers, you need to make things 2 or 3 times more challenging; parents, you need to demand that from both.”  

Force some honest conversations.  

—Guestblogger Mike Goldstein

E3′s Derrell Bradford has Jersey style social promotion (hat tip Joanne Jacobs).  

Elizabeth Green notes a surprise Jon Schnur departure from USDOE. Reformland = bummed.  

Flowers and Sausages describes real life teacher hiring committees. With bacon.  

Jay Mathews wonders if he’s an empty-headed optimist; reports on AFT innovation $ from Broad and Gates.  

And finally:

He stinks. But he rocks! 

—Guestblogger Mike Goldstein

Per this, Atlanta Journal Constitution reports Easy Grades Equate To Failing Grads.

Students such as Brandon Curry, 20, a graduate of Redan High in DeKalb County, said they were surprised to learn decent high school grades don’t always translate into college success.

“English was my strongest subject,” he said after a remedial reading class earlier this spring at Georgia Perimeter College in Clarkston. “But when I came to college, I was like, ‘Whoa.  ”I’m on this level,” he said, motioning to about knee-level. “And I’m supposed to be up here,” he said, raising his hand above his chest.

Once again, we’ve got the high school GRADS—not the 50% who don’t make it to high school graduation in May, the 50% who DO make it—but then go on to get academically hammered in college because high school required basically no legit work.  

Several current teachers said they could not agree to have their name published along with their concerns because they feared for their jobs. Their complaints echoed recent blog posts and e-mails from other teachers.

They said that some schools bar teachers from giving “zeroes” —or even failing grades—for work never submitted, let students retake classes without penalty, and punish teachers who fail too many students. They said administrators pressure them to pass students who put little or no effort into learning because of fears that the students will drop out.

Policymakers take note. You’ve got half the loaf in place: accurate reporting of dropouts. Good. You need the other half. Each state must track and publish each high school’s COLLEGE success rates. Otherwise, you incentivize administrators to overrule teachers when they appropriately give out failing grades to kids.  

For top notch wonkery on this issue, read Stanford’s Michael Kirst’s blog.

—Guestblogger Mike Goldstein

I’ll be offline this week but proven guestblogger and MATCH school founder Michael Goldstein will hold things down here.  Enjoy.

And, here’s a little blast from the past with a contemporary angle to read this week: National standards, the early ’90s version (pdf).

Meanwhile, don’t miss David Harris in Indy Star columnist Mathew Tully’s Sunday column.     This Sherman Dorn post raises an issue in the same vein:  Is the disruptive strategy for school reform really viable or is the fundamental issue here so political that sooner or later there will have to be a political resolution with all the contention that entails?  In other words, on a weekly basis you hear ideas from technology to educator recruitment schemes that will allegedly have such a subtle disruptive effect that the system will radically change without ever knowing what hit it.   Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, but remain pretty skeptical given the history and some relatively unique characteristics of the education sector.  That doesn’t mean the new Terry Moe and John Chubb book is not interesting reading on this score as far as technology is concerned, it’s a more political take on the standard argument.  Rather, that despite all that we may well be waiting in vain for these various dynamics to genuinely solve today’s political problem for us.  

Since nudging is becoming popular in policy circles it seems plausible there will be a debate about whether we can nudge our way to better public schools.   And some “nudge theory” can certainly help, especially in concert with the choice culture that the new generation of public school parents takes for granted.   Still, overall we’re talking about one hell of a nudge given today’s state of affairs.  There is little doubt where Joel Klein comes down in all this.   He lays out his view in a USN op-ed (and don’t miss the inside baseball of the last graf).  Klein’s EEP project is also organizing a rally in Washington on May 16th.

This LA Times story about firing teachers and this St. Pete Times one that preceded it are going to cause a lot of chatter and are at one level shocking.   And perhaps the days of “tenure” are numbered.  But American education’s problem is far less observably bad teachers, who thankfully are a small minority, than un-observably ineffective ones, something that we really can’t quantify because so little systemic attention has been paid to human capital for so long.   In other words, these stories get headlines and hardly bolster confidence but the larger issue is classrooms where students just aren’t learning much.  Addressing that is more complicated as a substantive matter and as a political one but likely a lot more powerful in terms of impact on student outcomes.

Finally, here’s a debate on “merit pay” from PBS.   It’s unfortunate that it wasn’t a broader discussion of differentiating pay and not only pay for performance, still interesting.   Also, is it rude to point out that if the AMA abused evidence the way the NEA does it would be a front page scandal?   They’d be touting the healing properties of leeches with a straight face…