posted by:
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Carol Fry Bohlin
on November 9, 2000
at 9:56PM
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subject:
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The Election
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This may be a good time to revisit some of Lynne Cheney's views regarding education in general, and mathematics education in particular...
"The Sizzling Lynne Cheney" by Suzanne Fields Source: Jewish World Review - 31 July 2000 http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/fields.html
THE DICK CHENEY NOMINATION is good for education. That's because his wife Lynne is a rigorous critic of what's wrong with public schools -- the textbooks and curriculum, as well as the mush of multiculturalism that seeps into the classrooms at our finest colleges and universities.
Talk about a bully pulpit. She can be a spokeswoman for restoring the dignity of honest intellectual debate, focusing like a laser (remember that expression) to expose the muddled thinking that corrupts academia and the rest of our culture.
As a veep's wife, she can show what's rotten in the culture with the zest and zeal that Betty Ford brought to drug abuse. Feminists who say they like strong, intelligent, intellectually independent women will get their wish in Lynne Cheney.
But certain feminists only like women who agree with them, and Lynne Cheney is not a "go along'' kind of woman. She is -- if you will excuse the sexist phrase -- "her own man.'' You can read that first hand in her book "Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense -- and What We Can Do About It,'' first published in 1995. Margaret Thatcher praised her for standing up to the bullies of political correctness, and George Will wanted to award her the Purple Heart for wounds suffered in the culture war.
When she was director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she discovered that humanities texts had been transformed into political documents, reduced to issues of "gender, race and class.'' Homer, Shakespeare and Milton were denigrated as "male chauvinists,'' and there was a determined attempt to get them out of the classroom, the effects of which are still with us today. (Without irony, some pundits -- even those who married one -- have sneered at Dick Cheney as "just another white male.'')
Lynne Cheney wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Matthew Arnold, whose guiding principle for studying the humanities was "a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.'' This is what must be restored to education in America.
"Lynne Cheney has the quaint notion that our universities ought to uphold the ethical and professional standards they profess -- integrity, competence, civility,common decency,'' says Eugene Genovese, a scholar and proponent of academic freedom who staunchly defends her criticism of the academy.
Dick Cheney says he wants to restore a spirit of civility in Washington, which is a reflection of his political style. Lynne Cheney wants to revitalize our understanding of compassion, returning it to its original meaning.
She recounts a terrible murder in South Philadelphia in 1994, when a man operating a Mr. Softee ice cream truck was killed by a 16-year old when he wouldn't give up his money. What extended the shock of this sordid episode was that as the driver lay dying in the street, neighborhood teenagers composed a rap song on the spot: "They Killed Mr. Softee.'' When the dying man's friend -- another ice cream salesman -- arrived, the teenagers ignored his grief and, laughing, demanded that he give them ice cream. Death was depersonalized.
For the perception of compassion that was absent from this scene, Lynne Cheney, blames a culture of divisiveness that emanates from an intellectual elite celebrating differences and victimhood rather than the richness of a common humanity.
She echoes columnist Bob Greene, who fears that America has "increasingly become a nation of citizens who watch anything and everything as if it is all a show.''
The Democrats who scorn W.'s choice of Dick Cheney -- along with much of the punditocracy -- deride him for having the admirable qualities of a public servant rather than the showier talents of a performer: "Where's the pizzazz? Where's the sizzle?'' Perhaps they prefer an actor out of the TV show "West Wing'' than a real-life chief of staff and defense secretary (though many of these same critics derided Ronald Reagan for "acting''). Where's the seriousness?
Dick Cheney offers plenty of that, with gravitas (this week's cliche). But if you want snap, crackle and pop, keep your eyes focused on the Second Lady (in waiting).
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Whole Hog for Whole Math By Lynne V. Cheney The Wall Street Journal February 3, 1998
"Whole math" is a form of instruction that has kids develop their own methods of multiplying and dividing, ask questions of one another rather than of teachers, and learn that answers that are close to correct are good enough. It's a phenomenon familiar across the country, but nowhere has it been embraced more enthusiastically than in California. Last December, however, the California State Board of Education struck a blow for common sense, voting unanimously to roll back whole math and to put in place rigorous, back-to-basics standards.
Parents opposed to whole math, many of them mathematicians, scientists and engineers, cheered the board on. But at the last minute, entering the fray in favor of whole math, was the National Science Foundation. On the day of the vote, Luther Williams, head of the NSF's education directorate, sent off a fax declaring that what the board was about to do was "shortsighted and detrimental to the long-term mathematical literacy of children in California." Moreover, he wrote, the "Foundation currently maintains a portfolio exceeding $50 million in awards to six public school systems in California," and that funding would be in jeopardy, he warned, should those school systems change direction.
Mr. Williams's letter "was a clear threat, a last-ditch effort," says state board member Janet Nicholas. And while it didn t change board members' minds, it did cause Ms. Nicholas to see the NSF in a new light. "I used to hold NSF in high regard, "she says. "I thought of it as an objective purveyor of facts, a source of analytic review. But it's a bully."
Alan Cromer, a physics professor at Northeastern University in Boston, says that the NSF began to lose its moorings in the early '90s, when the education directorate "latched onto constructivism," a philosophy that views knowledge as something that each of us creates rather than something with its source in the physical world. Constructivism provides the rationale for encouraging elementary school students to invent their own ways of multiplying and, when stymied, to ask other children for help. Peers are unlikely to know enough to provide answers -- and thus interfere with the individual's constructive process.
According to Mr. Cromer, NSF review panels for elementary and secondary education are now largely composed of people friendly to constructivism. In his book, "Connected Knowledge," he describes some of the results, including an NSF-funded middle-school science textbook that includes an exercise in which students squat by their desks while the teacher pops popcorn. The students gradually stand as the intensity of popping increases and then, with their eyes closed, make a graph of the event. "The point of this, believe it or not," Mr. Cromer writes, "is to demonstrate diversity. Each student, you see, will draw a different graph."
Mr. Cromer speculates that the reason constructivism has taken hold is that it confers status. Math and science educators are stuck in education departments, he observes. "What is their expertise?" he asks. "Constructivism gives them something to be expert on. It helps the professional lives of a marginalized group of people."
But constructivism has also been embraced as a way to transform science from "a white male domain," in the words of one NSF grantee, into an undertaking more in tune with "the sensibilities and values orientations of the underrepresented." This grantee, the New York State Systemic Initiative, is one of 59 projects in 42 states that together receive more than $100 million from the taxpayers a year to promote ideas like whole math on the grounds that they will, as the New Yorkers explain it, "expand the caricatured image of science" from "logical" to "creative" and thus create a "science for all."
Another NSF grantee, the Interactive Mathematics Project [sic], a highly controversial textbook series developed with more than $16 million in taxpayer funds, promises to make "the learning of college preparatory mathematics accessible to students, such as women and minorities, who traditionally have been under-represented in college mathematics classes." This will be done, according to the IMP application, by de-emphasizing mathematical facts and formulas, having students work in groups, and making sure that each of them has a calculator at all times.
But why will women and minorities fare better if science and math are presented as artistic and cooperative enterprises? Why will they benefit if everyone carries a calculator? The race-and-gender activists who advance these ideas seem not to realize that they are advancing stereotypes that portray women and minorities as inept at logic, competition and mental calculation.
In fact, the Department of Defense has found that instead of benefiting women and minorities, whole math hurts everyone. In 1995, whole-math curriculums were introduced into the department's overseas elementary and middle schools. A year later, when some 37,000 students took the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, scores dropped in all racial groups.
A dozen members of Congress have sent a letter to President Clinton expressing their disapproval of the NSF's attempt to influence the California State Board of Education. "To use the hammer of possible withdrawal of federal funds to force a state into compliance with unproven practices is unconscionable," they write.
Perhaps Mr. Clinton -- who's so impressed with the National Science Foundation that yesterday he proposed to increase its budget by some 10%, to $3.77 billion -- can use his vaunted rhetorical powers to explain what has happened to objectivity and judgment at the National Science Foundation -- and to inquire why this agency, like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, seems unable to maintain critical distance from trendy and harmful ideas.
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Mrs. Cheney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was formerly chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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http://mathematicallycorrect.com/wsj929.htm
The Wall Street Journal September 29, 1997
A Failing Grade for Clinton's National Standards
by Lynne Cheney
Steven Leinwand, who sits on the committee overseeing President Clinton's proposed national mathematics exam, has written an essay explaining why it is "downright dangerous" to teach students things like "six times seven is 42, put down two and carry the four." Such instruction sorts people out, Leinwand writes, "anointing the few," who master these procedures, and "casting out the many." As Mr. Leinwand tells it, there might once have been an excuse for such undemocratic goings-on, but we can now, because of technology, throw off "the discriminatory shackles of computational algorithms."
House and Senate conferees who will soon be deciding what to do about the Clinton plans for national testing ought to read Leinwand's essay, in part because it helps explain why the committee on which he sits recommended a national math exam that will avoid directly assessing "certain knowledge and skills such as whole number computation." And in case the exam might indirectly assess whether eighth-graders can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, the committee recommended that every student be armed with a calculator throughout.
But the most important reason for conferees to read this essay is to gain an appreciation for the kind of thinking that has become all too common in the educational establishment. Although his ideas might seem extreme, Leinwand is not a marginal figure. He is not only on the committee overseeing the president's proposed math exam, he is a consultant to the Connecticut Department of Education, sits on the board of a $10 million National Science Foundation mathematics program, and advises a standards-setting project being funded with tens of millions of dollars from the Pew and MacArthur Foundations.
Since 1989, when the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics set forth a radical vision for how mathematics should be taught, ideas like Leinwand's have increasingly become the order of the day. Mathland, an instructional program widely used in California's elementary schools, never does show kids the standard U.S. procedure for multidigit multiplication. But, in an apparent fit of multiculturalism, it does offer instruction on the very complicated way in which the ancient Egyptians managed these matters.
In the current debate, many otherwise sensible senators have been convinced that safeguards can be put in place to keep harmful fads from influencing standards and assessments. Recent history does not support this optimism. A few years ago, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I awarded a contract to develop national history standards. Although I required detailed plans from the contractor and had them thoroughly reviewed by knowledgeable people, the standards that were finally delivered were so suffused with political correctness that I felt obliged to condemn them--as did ninety-nine members of the United States senate.
The federal effort to set English/language arts standards produced such a muddle of trendy thinking that in 1994 the Department of Education cut off funding. Late last week, Secretary of Education Bill Riley backed off from the math test into which his department has recently poured thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of dollars. Calculator use should be narrowly restricted, the Secretary said.
Some in the Senate advocate turning national testing over to the National Assessment Governing Board, a bipartisan group appointed by the secretary of education, but that won't prevent foolish ideas from making their way into national tests. In order to fulfill the vision of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the board reduced the computational part of the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam by 20 percent for seventeen-year-olds and increased the portion of the exam on which they can use calculators to well over a third.
Meanwhile, there is good work going on in the states: sound history standards in Virginia and Texas, admirable English/language arts standards in Massachusetts. To be sure, there have been fiascos, most notably with reading and math standards in California, but pressure from concerned parents has turned California's reading program around, and there has been significant progress in restoring a mathematics program strong in the basics.
Setting standards and tests at the state level is no guarantee of success, but the accomplishments there certainly outshine the federal record, and the good work that has gone on outside of Washington could very well be rendered moot by a test created inside the Beltway. Even if a certain state decides not to participate in the Clinton testing plan, a federal test will strongly influence the textbooks used in that state's schools and determine the way its teachers are trained. And if that test is the disaster that the record indicates it will be, the result could be a national calamity.
The President has threatened to veto the labor, health, and human services appropriations bill if congress blocks his plans for national testing, and many members of the Senate are hesitant to oppose him, particularly since a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll that the administration has been passing around shows overwhelming public support for national testing. But Senator John Ashcroft (R., Mo.), trying to rally his colleagues to kill the Clinton plan, cites another part of the same poll. It shows that when pollsters explain that the federal government would establish the test and spell out standard pro and con arguments to those being polled, support for national testing drops to less than half.
"We should test our kids," Senator Ashcroft observes. "We need that accountability in education. But what we don't need is the federal government coming up with the tests we use."
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Here is the letter send to the Wall Street Jounal in response to the June 11, 1997 article by Lynne Cheney.
United States Department of Education
The Deputy Secretary
Mr. Ned Crab, Letters Editor The Wall Street Journal 200 Liberty Street New York, NY 10281
Dear Mr. Crab,
Over the last several years, polls have shown that Americans place education at the top of their domestic agenda. Americans want results. They want to know that the students everywhere are mastering basic skills and beyond and developing into successful, productive citizens.
In this climate of heightened focus on results in states and districts across the country, President Clinton has introduced a new stimulus: voluntary national tests in reading at the fourth grade and mathematics at the eight grade. These challenging tests, which will be available beginning in 1999, will represent widely accepted standards of student performance. The tests will communicate clear results to parents and teachers about every student s progress in reading and math and, for the first time, will show how students measure against widely accepted national and international standards of excellence.
Moreover, the tests are a tool for improving the odds for students and focusing national efforts on these key academic subjects. The mathematics and science community, engineers and business leaders are working to help students meet these challenging standards in math - and the US Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and others are developing a tool chest for parents and teachers and other concerned citizens on how to prepare to meet these standards, how to use these test results to improve education, and what high standards in reading and mathematics look like.
Top business leaders and a bipartisan group of governors agree that these tests can help raise standards and improve American Education. The voluntary national tests have been endorsed by the Business Roundtable, the National Alliance of Business, and 240 top executives of leading high-tech companies such as Apple Computer, America OnLine, and Netscape Communications. The governors and chief state school officers of Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, and West Virginia have already signed up to participate.
With this as a background, I would like to respond specifically to the views expressed by Lynne Cheney on the voluntary national mathematics test in the June 11 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Ms. Cheney asserts that the efforts to raise standards by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) - the president and past president of which serve on the panel charged with developing the specifications for the new mathematics test -- have resulted in students failing to learn the basics of math. While a colorful claim, this just isn t true. Ms. Cheney blatantly mischaracterizes their philosophy in claiming that NCTM believes that students needn t learn basic arithmetic.
Her views toward NCTM are an apparent change of heart. Ms. Cheney had it right the first time, and it is sad that she is trying to politicize this manner. Ms. Cheney was a member of the National Council on Education Standards and Testing. In its final report to Congress, which Ms. Cheney signed, the Council specifically cited the work of NCTM as an example of how "standards of assessments can serve as catalysts for raising expectations." The model national mathematics standards, introduced by NCTM in 1989, are the basis of many states own mathematics standards. By suggesting that NCTM ignores the importance of basic arithmetic and computation, Ms. Cheney does disservice to the 115,000 hardworking teachers and curriculum specialists who are members.
The recent results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) show that our nation s fourth graders are doing better than ever mastering the basics of arithmetic. While we should always aim higher, TIMSS shows that we can be pleased that our fourth graders perform above the international average in mathematics. These findings were in contrasts to the TIMSS results released last November showing that our nation s eighth graders scored below the international average in mathematics. This suggests that it is in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eight grades - when our students should be moving beyond arithmetic to learn elements of geometry, algebra, and measurement - that our schools need to do more to raise expectations and achievements. This is exactly what the voluntary national test in mathematics is intended to promote.
The voluntary national test will be demanding - far from the "fuzzy math" that Ms. Cheney asserts. The test will be based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) which shows how we are doing in the core academic subjects by regularly testing a small sample of students. One good way to understand how badly Ms. Cheney has mischaracterized the situation is to look at two representative items from recent NAEP s.
The first question asks students to estimate the amount of a 15 percent tip on a restaurant check of $24.99. Students could solve the problem in two basic ways - by rote calculation (multiplying 0.15 x 24.99) or by estimation. A common approach to estimation would be to realize that 10% of $25 is $2.50 and that 5% (or half of 10%) of $2.50 is $1.25. Thus, the total for a 15% tip of $24.99 is approximately $3.75. While most adults need to do this sort of calculation on a regular basis, and certainly whenever they dine out, only 38% of the nation s 8th graders could choose the correct answer.
The second question asks students to analyze data presented in a chart and text, which involves determining which data is relevant and which data should be grouped together. To correctly answer the question, students must calculate the amount of population growth, they must understand the differences between an absolute population growth and a population growth rate, and they must determine which type of population growth if being described in each section of the question. Finally, students are required not only to give a number answer but to clearly communicate and defend their arguments using both written English and mathematics. Only 35% of our 8th graders successfully answered this question. In business and civic life, being able to analyze this sort of data and make arguments based on it is critical. This problem shows, as often happens in the real world, there can be more than one way of interpreting data. To be successful in the workplace and society, our students need to be able to understand and solve these sorts of problems.
Governors and business leaders recognize that not enough of our eighth graders are ready for the challenging math in high school that is a stepping-stone to college and ultimately a variety of careers. Support for the voluntary national test in eighth grade mathematics is growing as a way to set clear standards for what students need to know and be able to do in order to succeed in the next century.
Sincerely,
Marshall S. Smith Acting Deputy Secretary
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