Mr Casey, Please accept my gratitude for having taken the time to write such thought provoking, substantive posts.
Am I mistaken that Mr Bracey argues that compared to teachers in say Taiwan or Japan or Germany, American math teachers do tend to have only a surface understanding of algorithms, themselves are more easily confused by something as simple as dividing by a fraction, tend not to understand subtraction by regrouping, and spend inordinate amounts of time spewing out definitions instead of working systematically through proofs? Or is Mr Bracey a critic of such a dismal estimate of American mathematics education?
May I also ask you whether we do have comparative data by district on the average math scores of teachers on their own SATs and credential examinations? Do we know whether the teachers' average is correlated with their district's income or wealth, with students' math performance? It may be that the vast majority of teachers even in impoverished districts are credentialed, and have degrees in the subjects which they teach; but it would still be illuminating to compare their raw scores with that of teachers in wealthier districts. Is the quality of instruction an over- or under-studied aspect of educational inequality?
It seems that all I ever read about is spending per head.
suburban school
>districts with higher pay and better working
>conditions were able to attract many urban teachers to
>fill their additional slots, leaving the urban schools
>with smaller numbers of experienced, licensed teachers
>teaching a greater number of classes and forcing them
>to take on large numbers of novice, inexperienced and
>unlicensed teachers; and urban schools, already
>overcrowded, were much more likely to lack the space
>to set up additional classes.]
Thank you for illuminating this disturbing consequence of a well intentioned reform.
Thank you again.
Regards, Jan
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