Singapore students are the best in the world in international math tests, so some schools are trying out the island nation’s curriculum. Singapore Math was a huge success in a Maryland experiment.Of course, this is par for the course for a field that never pays attention to the results of any experiment or project.The Singapore Math curriculum relies heavily on helping students master basic math facts before moving on to more theoretical concepts.
. . . The study’s authors were unambiguous about the success of Singapore Math.
“The results from Year 2 implementation of the quarterly assessments mirror the trends seen in Year 1 implementation. For every assessment, at every grade level, students in the Singapore Math pilot schools performed significantly higher” than schools that did not have the program, the report states.
Singapore Math appeared to be “more effective at helping minority students and students from low-income families.”
Yet schools are dropping Singapore Math. Now that the experiment is over, funding for materials and training has dried up. Rather than dip into school budgets, principals are switching to the new county math curriculum, which is aligned to state tests and said to be more rigorous than the old curriculum. And it’s cheaper than funding a special program — in the short run.
By a more than 2-to-1 ratio, residents of Bolinas, Calif.—which turns out to be some sort of hippie enclave, according to our readers—approved Measure G, “for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.” That’s actually what the thing says. Bolinasians voted 314 to 152 in favor of this nonsense.
They’re taking all the fun out of mockery.
Republican Sen. Pat Roberts said Democrats have undermined the inquiry he is leading into Iraq prewar intelligence by drafting a memo aimed at discrediting the Senate Intelligence Committee’s work. […]
[Democratic Senator] Rockefeller acknowledged the document after news reports quoted excerpts from it. The memo spells out steps to make the committee’s inquiry irrelevant by setting up an independent commission, and in the process attempt to “castigate” majority Republicans. It suggested “pulling the trigger” on the plan “probably next year.”
It’s not so much that the Democratic Party leaders would turn a vitally needed review of our intelligence operations into a partisan witch hunt, but that they’re dumb enough to let the memo leak. Have they gotten so arrogant that they feel no need to put up a facade? Or did this kind of thing get out before and it’s only because of the blogosphere that it becomes widely known?