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Re: Exit Exams Face Pinch in Common-Core Push
Posted:
Oct 9, 2012 6:05 AM
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On Oct 8, 2012, at 3:34 PM, Paul Tanner <upprho@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have addressed his utterly bogus claim that minimum standards
> imposed on all - students and teachers - have gone down, by showing
> that it is plain fact that they have gone up.
Show me where I made such a claim?
Jerry posted an article which quoted Robert Rothman...
"But the use of newer, more-rigorous tests as graduation requirements could have an especially negative impact on minority students, said Robert Rothman, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, which advocates high school policies that promote college and career success."
I questioned this statement. Wasn't the point of integration to ensure that all students had access to rigorous classes? Remember? Separate but equal wasn't equal. What am I supposed to do if I am an engineer and a minority and I send my son or daughter to school and when they return home, I review their schoolwork and I am appalled at its lack of substance? Am I to accept the school's excuse that they removed the substance because it negatively impacted minority students? Negatively impacted how?
Regarding textbooks, I have in front of me "Modern Algebra and Trigonometry, Structure and Method, Book 2" published 1965, 1963 by Houghton Mifflin Company. It has all of those topics you listed. Why do you insist that this type of curriculum was a more recent invention? Is it possible that because of the book you used in high school you were simply unaware of how "modern" and technical the Dolciani books actually were? One thing I hadn't noticed before is that in the acknowledgments section the authors of SM2 pay tribute to this book from 1957...
http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Problem-Solving-Book-One/dp/B002ERFRLE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1349775595&sr=8-2&keywords=Julius+Freilich
I wonder if that series was actually the beginning of modern high school algebra? By modern I mean the end of Trigonometry as a subject by itself. The NY Regents offered the last Trig exam in 1964, so I am probably close. And the term "precalculus" doesn't become widely used till 1970...
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=precalculus&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Which is probably the result of trying to pace the amount of math that found itself in algebra (after courses like trig (1964) and solid geometry (1960) disappeared) along with the fact that calculus had become a high school subject.
By the way, the term prealgebra doesn't come into use till 1980...
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prealgebra&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
which probably signals the beginning of trying to get everyone to take algebra.
Bob Hansen
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