:Textbook Evaluator

I recently finished McCullough’s biography of Adams. Great read.

Here’s what our Second President once wrote about education. He saw it as a public good…and an important responsibility of the state. And a way to reduce class divisions.

[Before any great things can be accomplished], a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, ust become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.

Over two hundred years later we’re still trying to close the gap between the classes.

Mark A. Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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Well, the Education Wonks have done it again. The latest edition of the Carnival of Education is now up and running here. Check it out.

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While I don’t see technology as a panacea for every problem, I do recognize its power in teaching world languages. I have been a fan of Speak Shop for a long time.  Speak Shop provides Spanish tutors from Guatemala using video conferencing.  Now I learn that schools are taking advantage of video conferencing technology and Skype to deliver Chinese language instruction, and that new businesses in China are getting into the act.
This is an excerpt from the article, found on InfoWorld:

EChineseLearning, in Beijing, offers daily Chinese classes for a monthly subscription fee of $100. The 50-minute lessons are taught by teachers from Beijing Language and Culture University and other schools that work for eChineseLearning on a part-time basis. The classes are all taught online, using the voice chat features of Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, or Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger.

“We mostly use Skype because the sound quality is better,” said Michael Zhong, an eChineseLearning sales executive.

Founded last year, eChineseLearning currently has about 100 students ranging in age from children to adults, mostly from the United States, Zhong said. They pay for their lessons using PayPal or Google Checkout.

Beijing may be half a world away from students in the United States, but the time difference is well suited to evening lessons for U.S. students, Zhong said, noting that 8 a.m., Beijing time, is equivalent to 8 p.m. in New York or 5 p.m. in San Francisco.

What with the dearth of qualified Chinese language teachers in this country, it is only natural that schools and individual students are turning to, well, China. Lots of qualified teachers with higher education degrees in linguistics and English, who are looking for well-paid jobs.

This could be a wave of the future. Not only will it provide opportunities for Americans to learn some of the less commonly taught languages (affectionately referred to as “LCTLs”), but it will move world language instruction in the US into the 21st century.

Very cool.

Mark Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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A recent story in the Orlando Sentinel sounded the alert that geography education has been neglected in American schools and, surprisingly, in higher education. The discipline that Alexander Graham Bell (an early director of the National Geographic Society) defined as “the world and everything in it” has been flung by the wayside, especially as a result of No Child Left Behind’s focus on literacy, math, and science.

First, let’s ask, “what is geography?”

Well, if we take Bell’s definition, it’s just about everything. We have physical geography, which explores the physical features of the planet, including landforms and the atmosphere. So geography includes both geology and meteorology (or climatology, if you prefer). We also have political geography, which includes the interaction of nation states and the battle for human control of the earth’s resources. So geography is also akin to political science. Then there is economic geography, which focuses more narrowly on the earth’s resources and how humans make use of them. So geography is similar to economics, perhaps, too. Human geography includes these latter two sorts of “human-environment” interaction, plus a heavy dose of human cultures, which have developed in connection with the inhabitants’ physical geography. So geography is also related to anthropology.

So geography is just about every social science discipline–all rolled into one. Geology. Meteorology. Political Science. Economics. Anthropology.
(I’ll leave it to another day to debate whether geography really is a separate discipline. For if geography contains all the social sciences, it’s hard to make a case for studying it separately. And most colleges and universities have eliminated geography programs for that reason. I’m not sure this is a good thing, but we’ll leave that line of inquiry for later.)

So if geography is a disciplinary cornucopia, how is it taught? What is the focus of geography lessons our schools? MAPS.

Can you locate this bay?
Do you know the latitude and longitude of this?
How many lakes are there in Finland?
What is the capital of Upper Slobovia?

Can you just feel students’ excitement in studying this stuff? What’s Rhett Butler’s line? “Frankly, Teach, I don’t give a damn.”

The National Geographic Society has made a ruckus about the lack of geography education in America. For example, the NGS commissioned a Roper poll to gauge the geographic literacy of young people. Naturally, young people have a hard time finding the Pacific Ocean on a map, much less pinpointing where Israel is located. All one need do is watch Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking” segments from time to time to know that American’s are geographically ignorant.
But frankly, my dears, is it really all that important to locate stuff on a map? I mean, it’s nice to know that the capital of Madagascar is Antananarivo. But why does a 9th grader need to know that? What’s the connection?

In fact, if you look at the National Geography Standards, developed by the National Geographic Society and others, you’ll find that “location” is only one of the 18 standards. The standards supposedly support much deeper understanding of political, economic, cultural, and physical geography.

And yet, ask most teachers what geography is or how they are teaching you, they’ll point to the pretty, student-produced maps around the room. Which is a far cry from Alexander Graham Bell’s vision of the discipline. It’s also a far cry from what we really want our kids to know and understand about our world.

So what is National Geographic doing about this appalling dearth of geography awareness? Well, first and foremost, they’re launching a media campaign. Nothing like a little PR to get things stirred up.

National Geographic and leading education, business, and nonprofit partners have launched My Wonderful World, a campaign to increase global learning in school, at home, and in the community. With the help of parents, teachers—and you—we can help give our youth the power of global knowledge. Because kids who understand our world today can succeed in it tomorrow.

Fine and dandy. A media campaign. But with all the resources at its disposal, what is National Geographic doing about textbooks? What impact does National Geographic have on how geography is taught in our schools?
Frighteningly, one of the worst-rated textbooks I have worked with is the Glencoe World Geography textbook endorsed by the National Geographic Society. Furthermore, the author of this book, Richard G. Boehm, was a leader of the panel that developed the national geography standards! Yet when a team of well-trained teachers in one of our client districts reviewed this textbook, it ranked near the bottom of the pile. (To read a summary of our review of the Glencoe book, click over here).

While I myself am something of a geography nut (I can indulge my imagination for hours looking at a National Geographic atlas), and while my kids and I play “name that capital” games in the car, I have to admit that most of the questions asked in the Roper poll and identified in the Orlando Sentinel article amount to little more than trivia. Nothing conceptual about this trivia. So why learn it?

Actually, there are lots of reasons to learn about geography. And I suppose National Geographic’s “My Wonderful World” campaign is a step in the right direction.

But why is National Geographic Society endorsing a lousy textbook? The prose is boring and convoluted. So much information is packed between its covers that it reads more like an encyclopedia than a resource for student learning. It’s a bunch of facts. Here’s an excerpt from page 136 of the teacher’s wraparound edition:

Coastal Cities

Many population centers in the United States and Canada lie in coastal areas where healthy economies support large populations. Along the northern Atlantic coast of the United States, for example, a chain of closely linked metropolitan areas forms a “megalopolis,” or “great city.” Home to abut 42 million people, this megalopolis–nicknamed BosWash–includes the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Four of the cities–Boston, New York, Philadephia, and Baltimore–are important world trade centers because of their coastal or near coastal locations. The planned city of Washington, D.C., established on the Potomac River near the Chesapeake Bay, is the country’s capital.

Okay, class, how many facts are contained in this paragraph? What region is being discussed? What is a megalopolis? Where is BosWash? What is it? How many people live there? What is the capital of the United States? On what river is it located? Near what bay is this river located?

Who cares?

WHY the heck is any of this information important for a 9th grader to know? The one tidbit of information contained in the paragraph that has some conceptual value is drowned by the facts: what is the relationship between economic vitality and population distribution? This is an analytical or conceptual relationship that could be–should be–the basis for a decent lesson in geography.

But the lugubrious, jam-packed prose bores the reader to death before we even have a chance to ask a decent inquiry question.

To me, those who believe in geography education so fervently must do a better job of demonstrating how geography can be taught in a relevant, interesting, engaging way. There is at least one textbook out there that does a pretty good job.

But it is so disappointing that National Geographic has chosen to support one of the worst high school geography books on the market today.

Mark Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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This post continues a periodic explanation of our work at EdVantage Consulting. We help districts evaluate textbooks and other instructional materials as they move through the selection process and make critical investments to support their curriculum.

Past posts have introduced the process, differentiated between the two basic approaches to teaching world geography at the high school level, identified the preferred approach of our client district, described the process, and enumerated the criteria.

Here we continue our results.

Glencoe/McGraw-Hill
World Geography
ISBN 0-07-860700-0 (Teacher’s Wrap-Around Edition)
Price: $67 student edition
Overall Weighted Rating: 40%
Geography Content and Processes: 42% (Rated in 7th place out of 8 )
This book, which bears the imprimatur of the National Geographic Society, was a disappointment to our reviewers. Like most high school texts, this book takes a regional approach, and while it may be “standards-aligned,” (an 8-page standards matrix demonstrates that all 18 standards are covered) it is not “standards-based.” Evaluators were unable to discern a strong focus: each chapter “covers” as many as 10 standards. Evaluators agreed that the book is rich with content, but it is presented in a disjointed fashion that was unlikely to lead to student understanding or acquisition of that new content knowledge.

Work Students Do: 42% (Rated in 4th place out of 8 )
This text contains a variety of activities, but they tend to be a disjointed collection rather than a scaffolded sequence. Evaluators identified various activities that could be assigned to students, including reading comprehension exercises, short writing assignments, comparisons and contrasts, and journaling. The assessment pages at the end of each chapter contain many suggested activities, including Internet activities and report writing. The majority of the activities, however, require recall of factual information, rather than analysis of geographic problems, and help prepare students for taking standardized tests, rather than help them to examine interesting issues through a geographic lens.

Teacher Support: 33% (Rated in 6th place out of 8 )
This text does not have a coherent instructional approach. The teacher’s wrap-around edition contains many pages of teaching suggestions and ideas for presenting the content, including suggestions for differentiating instruction and for cooperative learning activities. These suggestions are very brief—often a sentence or two—leaving the bulk of the instructional work up to the teacher. For example, the student edition includes a “GeoJournal” descriptive writing exercise that is introduced in two sentences. The teacher’s notes then prompt teachers to check student journals for “accurate information and concrete details.” Evaluators found such a cursory approach unhelpful. Like other books of this type, the presentation is relatively encyclopedic, with the addition of numerous off-set boxes, illustrations, and asides. Also like most other major publishers, the textbook program includes many supplemental materials that are sold separately to help teachers make better use of the book. But by itself, evaluators found this book to be so crammed with divergent, disjointed ideas as to be very confusing for both teacher and student.

Assessment: 37% (Rated in 6th place out of 8 )
Most of the assessments in this program are supplemental to the textbook and were not thoroughly reviewed. The text itself contains at least two pages of assessment activities for each chapter. These activities require recall of factual information. The teacher’s edition references the existence of performance assessments among the supplemental materials, but again, these were not reviewed. Evaluators did not find assessments that would help them gauge student progress toward the mastery of the standards; rather the assessments in the book tend to focus on isolated facts rather than upon building geographic skills.
Units or Chapters Evaluated
Both groups examined the unit on Latin America. Both groups examined the introduction to the unit: “What Makes Latin America a Region?” The first group then read chapters 9 and 10: “The Cultural Geography of Latin America,” and “Latin America Today.” The second group also read chapters 8 and 10: “The Cultural Geography of Latin America,” and “Latin America Today.”

Mark Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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This post continues a periodic explanation of our work at EdVantage Consulting. We help districts evaluate textbooks and other instructional materials as they move through the selection process and make critical investments to support their curriculum.

Past posts have introduced the process, differentiated between the two basic approaches to teaching world geography at the high school level, identified the preferred approach of our client district, described the process, and enumerated the criteria.

Here we continue our results.

Pearson/Prentice Hall
An Introduction to Human Geography
ISBN: 0-13-192019-7 (Student edition plus Instructor’s Manual)
Price: $80 student edition

Overall Weighted Rating: 33% (Ranked 7th overall out of 8 books reviewed)

Geography Content and Processes: 49% (Rated in 5th place out of 8 )
This was the only college-level text systematically reviewed by this committee. Opinions diverged on how best to analyze the content of the book. Most said that they “liked” the book, in that the content was well-organized and interestingly presented in a thematic fashion. However, because the reading level is much higher than most ninth graders in Aurora can handle (33% of the district’s students are English language learners), the evaluators tended to dismiss the book’s content. In addition, because the book was not written with reference to the geography standards, it was more difficult for evaluators to discern which standards were being addressed. Still, evaluators did note that chapters tend to be focused on a single idea (or small set of related ideas), and makes little attempt to “cover” everything. Thus, most evaluators were impressed with the text’s ability to walk the line between breadth and depth, and gave the text excellent marks for content accuracy.

Work Students Do: 19% (Rated in 8th place out of 8 )
This book might have fared better in this evaluation had it provided activities for the students to investigate the content. The only activities are sets of questions at the end of each chapter to get students “thinking geographically.” One evaluator liked the inquiry questions presented at the beginning of each chapter, which are then followed up by the answers at the end of the chapter: he felt this helped to give a conceptual focus to each chapter. But because evaluators were seeking activities that could help ensure student understanding and mastery of standards concepts, this book received very poor marks in its ability to engage students in the discipline.

Teacher Support: 20% (Rated in 8th place out of 8 )
Like most college texts, this book fails to provide much in the way of teacher support. The instructor’s guide does provide an introduction to the chapter and suggestions on how to focus lectures and class time; yet it is not really a guide to instruction. Presumably, teachers are expected to assign passages of the book in order to support whatever activities or lectures a teacher may choose to create. The text does include website resources (including internet investigations and study exercises), which provides activities both for teacher and student, but these are supplemental to the text and were not reviewed.

Assessment: 17% (Rated in 8th place out of 8 )
Here again, this textbook assumes that the instructor will do most—if not all—of the work in creating assessments. The only item the evaluators found that could be considered assessments were the “Thinking Geographically” questions at the end of each chapter. These are open-ended questions to generate student inquiry or investigation. However, the instructor’s guide does not suggest ways in which to use these questions for assessing student knowledge, nor does it provide scoring rubrics or other indications of what student answers might be.

Units or Chapters Evaluated
Both groups skimmed chapter 1 (“Thinking Geographically”). The first group then read chapter 14 (“Resource Issues”) along with the relevant passages from the Instructor’s Manual (pp. 87-94). The second group read chapter 4 (“Folk and Popular Culture”) along with passages from the Instructor’s Manual (pp. 23-27).

Mark Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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This week’s Carnival of Education is now up and running, thanks our gracious hosts, The Education Wonks. As usual, it’s a fabulous look at what’s new in the EduSphere.

Check out Matthew K. Tabor’s post about a Texas teacher fired for upholding high academic standards. Seems that some of the Mommies and Daddies were upset that their little dears were getting points off for wrong answers on math tests. Tsk, tsk…what a shocker.

Joanne Jacobs has an interesting post about a kid thrown out of school for saying he “didn’t like” some of the students in his class. Rumors then flew that this reclusive loner was out to kill the designated students. The school, fearful of potential tragedies and law suits, barred the kid from school. But did anyone reach out to him? A sign of the times….

And Miss Profe make some interesting comparisons between the educational systems in France in the US. Guess which society holds kids more accountable for their successes and failures? Certainly when I taught in France, the students owned their grades much more than our whiners in the US (see Joanne Jacobs, above). Not much has changed, according to Miss Profe.

Have a look at all the other excellent contributions.

Mark Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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Educators and just about everyone else insist that one of the most important goals of education is to foster “critical thinking” in young people.Can anyone please define what that means?

How much knowledge of facts and mastery of information must one have in order to think critically about something?  For example, how much math must one master before he can think critically about it?

Is “critical thinking” the same as “criticizing”?  Is it merely about dissecting a phenomenon from different angles, deconstructing it in a post-modern way?

Can one be a “critic” if one really doesn’t know what he’s talking about?  Again, is one’s ability to “think critically” predicated on a discrete knowledge base?

To me, the phrase “critical thinking” is empty. Let’s give it some shape or toss it in the lexical garbage can.

Mark Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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This post continues a periodic explanation of our work at EdVantage Consulting. We help districts evaluate textbooks and other instructional materials as they move through the selection process and make critical investments to support their curriculum.

Past posts have introduced the process, differentiated between the two basic approaches to teaching world geography at the high school level, identified the preferred approach of our client district, described the process, and enumerated the criteria.

Here we begin listing our results, beginning with the book that was the least favorite of the review team.

Holt/World Geography
Weighted Score 30%
Content 29%
Work Students Do 35%
Assessment 25%
Teacher Support 32%

Book details:
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
Title: World Geography
ISBN 0-03-043624-9 (Teacher’s Wrap-Around Edition)
Price: $61 student edition
Overall Weighted Rating: 30%

Geography Content and Processes: 29% (Rated in 8th place of 8 ).
The committee’s primary objection to this book was the lack of depth in its content. Many felt that it was more appropriate for a middle school course than high school course (indeed, many middle schools do use this text). Like most other texts we reviewed, this is not a standards-based text. Though it lacks a standards matrix as appears on other books, the Holt text aligns itself to the standards and evaluators identified that each chapter “covered” as many as 9 or 10 standards at least in some cursory way. The evaluators disliked the disjointed way in which content was presented.

Work Students Do: 35% (Rated in 6th place of 8 ).
The text contains few fully developed activities, other than review questions and standardized test practice. The text does provide some suggestions for “writing workshops,” analyses of charts and graphs, creation of “travel logs, and other activities, but the sparse instructions force teachers to fill in the gaps and to prepare instruction themselves with little guidance. Further, it is unclear how these activities will lead to understanding or mastery of the standards. For example, an activity called “Plan a Defense Strategy” (p. 273) asks students to plan a defense strategy that will protect a region from invasion. This could be a great activity, but it lacks adequate resources for the student to complete it successfully.

Teacher Support: 25% (Rated in 7th place of 8 ).
Most of the teacher support materials are supplemental to the program and normally sold separately from the textbook. Therefore they were not reviewed. The text repeatedly points teachers to these ancillary resources. Some activities do have skeletal grading “rubric” or guidelines (such as the “Travel Fair” activity described on page 272. Units also have suggested “bellringer” activities. There are also some tips in the margin about differentiating instruction. Given the low scores this text received from the evaluation committee, it is clear that these activities, while numerous, were neither coherent nor impressive.

Assessment: 32% (Rated in 7th place of 8 ).
Again, most of the assessment program is ancillary to the textbook, and therefore not reviewed. Each chapter does include an assessment section comprised of half a dozen reading comprehension questions. Each chapter also has a “chapter review” page that includes objective and open-ended questions. Some of these require students to apply knowledge or make generalizations, but it is not clear how these questions relate to student mastery of the standards.

Units or Chapters Evaluated
Both groups skimmed the entirety of unit two on Latin America. The first group then read chapter 11 (“Pacific South America”) and the second group read chapter 7 (“Mexico”).

Mark Montgomery
Textbook Evaluations
EdVantage Consulting

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I’ve written before that part of the problem in education today is that the public is afraid to make some tough decisions about what aspects of a public education are essential, and what aspects are merely desirable. You can have a look at a recent post on this subject here.

While my focus has been on K-12 education, the same conundrum exists in higher education. We seem to be unable to make decisions on how best to allocate resources. We end up making non-decisions.

The Denver Post reported today that the Higher Education Department’s David Skaggs (a former Colorado Congressman) is considering dropping a policy that forces the state’s universities to discontinue programs and majors that chronically register low enrollments.

Here’s an excerpt:

State education officials are considering ditching a decade- old policy of putting poorly attended state college programs on a “discontinuance” list because most of those programs are in science, math and engineering.

“The policy tends to surface things we really can’t seriously consider eliminating,” said David Skaggs, Department of Higher Education executive director.

Among those often on the list, for example, are master’s degree programs in math and physics.

“The state’s and the country’s competitiveness is going to be determined by how well we train our young people in these key areas, which are the drivers of new products and services,” Skaggs said.

Skaggs’ analysis is good, but his decision is wrong-headed. Why can’t we seriously consider eliminating a MA program in math or science? Why does every state-funded college in the state need MA and PhD degrees in physics? If there is low demand for physics, then why develop surplus capacity in physics?

Back to Economics 101: Supply and Demand.

I am not at all saying that Colorado should neglect math and science education, and that we should have capacity in the state to train the best minds in these fields. But we need to be smart about how we allocate resources. It seems silly to maintain expensive graduate degree programs when a sizable portion of our citizenry cannot to basic algebra on our state-level exams (known affectionately as the CSAPs).

Is it smart to have third-rate math departments at all our universities that churn out fair-to-middling MA and PhD graduates? Or should we invest in one or two top-notch departments that are the envy of every university in America?

Also, I’m not saying that we should eliminate undergraduate math and science majors at our universities. But we need not create an over-capacity of research-oriented departments to train graduate level experts and scholars.

Perhaps Skaggs has spent too much time hanging out with faculty at the major research universities, where their impulse is to protect every last state dime they can. As the leader of our Higher Education Department, he should think more strategically and make those “tough choices” I keep ranting about.

Honestly, folks, Dick Lamm, our former democratic governor who now lectures ad nauseam about our political leaders’ unwillingness to make these tough decisions, does have a point. Sometimes a leader has to stick his neck out and lead.

Mr. Skaggs: please step up.

Mark Montgomery
EdVantage Consulting

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