Who cares about Celesta?

Laurie H. Rogers – Celesta is a high school junior in Spokane Public Schools. She’s a good
student – “attentive,” she says. But she’s missing basic math skills, and
she’s struggling to get through her 11th-grade math class.

By Laurie H. Rogers
Author of “Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America
and What You Can Do about it”
and “Betrayed” – a blog on education
http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com
and Member of the executive committee for Where’s the Math?

Celesta is a high school junior in Spokane Public Schools. She’s a good
student – “attentive,” she says. But she’s missing basic math skills, and
she’s struggling to get through her 11th-grade math class.

Celesta has a dream. She wants to be a business owner. She plans to attend
university and get a degree, with a major in business and a minor in
accounting. She says she wants to “run some kind of business of my own. I
want to be in charge.”

Celesta has one more year before she is supposed to graduate and go to
college. Without intervention of some kind, when she takes college entrance
exams, she’s likely to test into arithmetic. She’ll have to pay for several
non-credit-bearing remedial math classes before she even begins college math
classes. She’ll be at risk of failing those remedial math classes. Almost
50% of the students who take those classes at our local community colleges
do not pass them.

You wouldn’t expect Celesta to be in this position. Currently, she carries a
3.6 GPA. Up until 11th grade, she passed all math tests and got As in all
math classes. She’s always been considered to be a good student. In fact,
because they all did so well in their math classes, she and more than two
dozen other students were placed into honors pre-calculus. There was never
any indication before this year, she said, that they had gaps in math
skills, or learning issues, or that they were struggling in any way. None
was considered to be a special education student.

Celesta said she and many of her classmates aren’t proficient in algebra or
geometry, but the problem is deeper than that. Their pre-calculus teacher
must continually stop teaching pre-calculus so he can teach basic math
skills to his class.

“Pretty much every day I hear him say, ‘Well, you should have learned this
already, but we have to go over it,’” Celesta says. “It makes me feel stupid
. He’s not really that sweet about it. He’ll be like ‘I’m teaching this
lesson and half of you are gonna get it and half of you won’t, and a quarter
of you will never get it.’ And I just feel like that quarter that’s never
gonna get it.”

I tested Celesta a few weeks ago using a basic skills test, and she tested
into 5th-grade math. However, her lack of proficiency with multiplication
facts and division puts her into 4th-grade math. This year is the first year
she’s ever seen long division, she says. Her pre-calc teacher showed the
skill to his class, but there hasn’t been time to learn it to mastery. A
deficiency in division inhibits students in any number of mathematical
procedures, including determining averages, isolating variables, and
simplifying fractions.

Celesta also doesn’t know her multiplication facts. This honors student
couldn’t tell me what 6×8 equals. She didn’t know what a radical is. She
expressed doubts about her ability to convert from fractions to percents to
decimals. On the pre-algebra portion of my test, she got one answer out of
20 correct.

“I wish that I would have got direct instruction in the first place,” she
says. “I feel like it is a better approach to math, and that if I did learn
it that way in the first place, I would be very successful right now. But
because I don’t know that, I need to sit there and pretty much have someone
baby me, as much as I hate to admit it.”

If Celesta tests into remedial math at Spokane Falls Community College, she
might not get direct instruction there, either. Not long ago, SFCC began
offering its remedial math classes with an approach that looks a lot like
the approach that has already failed Celesta.

How many young people in our communities are in Celesta’s position? The
district implies that Celesta’s story is rare, but Celesta isn’t alone or
even unusual. In fact, students in her position are now the norm in
America’s public education system. I hear stories like hers all of the time.
Every day. All day.

When I talk with younger people in my community — in restaurants, fast food
venues, and businesses around town — they’ll eventually confide — somewhat
sheepishly — that they dropped out of college because they couldn’t get
through remedial math, or that they struggled in school but hope to go back.
It hurts my heart to hear their doubts about their own abilities. I know
those doubts were fostered in them by a self-serving bureaucracy that
refuses to acknowledge its massive error in math. I try to reassure them,
but it’s a lot to explain in a few minutes. They go away, still certain that
they just couldn’t cut it.

Whenever I pay for purchases and wait for change, I watch the younger crowd
stumble to do it correctly, often making mistakes, then not understanding as
I count it back for them. And math isn’t their only weakness. Their
handwriting (usually just printing) is atrocious, their spelling is
imaginary, their punctuation and grammar non-existent. This is not their
fault. This is the district’s fault.

And Spokane Public Schools isn’t alone in having failed these people. The
problem is mirrored across the country – from border to border and from
coast to coast. When I talk with others about this — teachers, parents,
students, advocates — their stories are the same as mine. They saw the
problem, many spoke up, all were patronized and dismissed, and their
district’s administration just rolled over top of them. And the children in
their communities continued to be failed.

Who cares about Celesta and all of these other poorly-educated children?
Caring about them means caring about our communities and about our country.
They are the face of our future, and they are not prepared.

Comments

pbinCA

June 7, 2011 at 3:56 pm

OK, but how would you prioritize between?
– intervening to help the elementary kids who right now are not learning their mult. and div. basics on first exposure
– intervening to help Celesta’s peer group with the same material remedially

??

When a water pipe breaks, what do you do first? Find the valve and shut it off? Or, grab a mop and start mopping? Common sense. What about Adult Ed classes for Celesta?

Math Ed obliges sticking to a “master, then advance” paradigm.

Reply
Laurie Rogers

June 7, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Thank you, pbinCA. I appreciate the comment. Yes, it’s difficult to know where to put one’s limited resources. I want to help all 28,000 students in my district, and it’s impossible to do unless all parents know the truth AND take steps to fill in gaps … OR the district sees the light and changes how it does business.
What I’m doing is four-pronged, and it isn’t easy, I’ll grant you.
1. I’m working to inform parents so that they have the information they need to help their own children and other children within their sphere of influence.
2. My colleagues and I are setting up a community tutoring program so that we can help some of the children.
3. My colleagues and I are still working for systemic change.
4. I need to be several people to do all of this, and that’s why I’m also working to build our group and gain allies and extra hands.
The children’s future, and the future of this country, depend on our eventual success in these areas.

Laurie Rogers

Reply
Joan Ritchie

June 8, 2011 at 3:06 pm

I can relate to this 1/2 won’t get the math problem.
I went to 5th grade math classes with a granddaughter so I could understand her questions. There were frquently 3 new types of problems to a page. Just never a chance to MASTER any thing.
To this day the best I can say about this New New Math is, the problems can be done but not by me!
Joan

Reply
Ann

June 8, 2011 at 5:02 pm

What about the students? How many of us have tried to teach students only to be faced with overwhelming apathy and an unwillingness to put effort into learning. Students don’t seem to see the need to learn anything until it is too late (after graduation) and too many parents are too willing to blame teachers for their child not succeeding rather than stepping in and supporting/demanding homework or at least effort from their child.

Reply
pbinCA

June 8, 2011 at 7:29 pm

I’ve had some limited success with “re-engaging” students who got turned off to Math.
We would all do well to follow Laurie’s lead, and stop assuming that Math attrition is a 1-way street. Re-engagement is possible. It hasn’t been tried in any systematic way.

However, it’s a tricky undertaking. We can ill afford to send a message to the young ones that “you can fail math learning the first time out…because there will be a backup system later”. We need to keep the major focus on Mastery at each stage, and make advancement contingent on it (like in Japan). It’s only because of this reality that my willingness to cater to Celesta is measured. The best thing she has going for her is her strong motivation to fill in her math gaps!

Reply
Laurie Rogers

June 8, 2011 at 8:33 pm

I do see the apathy, Ann, but when you dig down to where that apathy comes from, you often see that the apathy is actually a cover for embarrassment, frustration, and a negative self-image — the results of an approach to math and other subjects that does not work for these students.

Every day, it’s group projects they must run themselves. Every day, it’s more math they have to figure out on their own, and struggling with advanced math when they don’t have basic skills. Every day, they face “peer reviews” so that there is NOWHERE to hide. Every day, it’s a failed test, and an IEP, or special accommodations, or pushing them through when they’re well aware they don’t have the skills for the next level. Every day, they’re blamed for not succeeding when the system will not allow them to succeed. It’s really very cruel.

My husband has a theory that many of these students don’t drop out — they “embarrass out.” I don’t see much compassion for their plight, however, in our district administration. What I hear is blame. It just isn’t in me to blame these children for the district’s failures.

Laurie Rogers

Reply
- brencis
  
  June 19, 2011 at 2:20 am
  
  Laurie
  
  They often “embarrass out”. When American schools are intent on grading the learning process (ie homework) what can you expect?
  
  There is almost no forum in which students can learn with confidence to try, space to make errors and a reassuring pat on the back from a teacher.
  
  Instead we grade them! Aaaaargh.
  
  Reply
Who cares about Celesta? – (part 1) | Vollok.com

July 24, 2011 at 1:48 am

[...] article was published June 6, 2011 on educationnews.org at: http://www.educationnews.org/blogs/157609.html This entry was posted in Education. Bookmark the permalink. ← Recreational [...]

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