Scott Garrett : I voted today to give control of our children’s education back to parents, teachers, and school boards by supporting H.R. 5, the Student Success Act.
New Jersey has many of the best schools and educators in the United States, yet the parents I speak to are concerned about the negative impact that federal programs like Common Core are having on the quality of our students’ education. For years, Washington has dangled federal funds in front of states and forced them to adopt their one-size-fits-all standards—this has to stop. The Student Success Act is an important first step towards ending the cycle of federal coercion and allowing New Jersey to determine its own success.
Rep. Mark Walker / @repmarkwalker / July 08, 2015
Rep. Mark Walker, a Republican, represents North Carolina’s 6th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Innovation starts locally—not in Washington.
Yet, over the past few years, we have witnessed the unprecedented expansion of the federal government into our classrooms.
Decades of regulations, mandates and rules have been piling up on our educators, but failing to improve our students’ education.
Congress is set to reconsider, and potentially reauthorize, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
This law outlines federal programs for K-12 education and was last reauthorized in 2002 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which further expanded Washington’s intrusion in our schools by creating new federal mandates.
No Child Left Behind also expired in 2007.
This means the Obama administration has been able to operate without certain limitations and has strong-armed states into complying with its liberal education agenda.
Thankfully, we have the opportunity to get Uncle Sam out of the business of micromanaging our schools from the top-down and return control to our local families, educators and officials.
This week in the House, my colleagues and I are revisiting the way Washington approaches our K-12 federal education policy with consideration of H.R. 5, the Student Success Act.
This bill repeals and reforms many failed education policies like the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) mandate, but I challenge that we can do even better for our children and future generations.
Conservatives have the largest majority in Congress that we have had in years, and we have a real opportunity to stand against Washington’s culture of bureaucracy and make a difference in our federal approach to education—let’s ensure we truly return education decisions back to the local-level.
We all agree that local communities—and ultimately parents—are best equipped to meet the unique needs of each student. Accordingly, they should be able to decide how best to utilize federal funding.
This is why I introduced the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS) amendment to the Student Success Act with Rep. Ron DeSantis (FL-06). The A-PLUS amendment would give states maximum flexibility by allowing them to opt-out of federal mandates and programs while retaining federal funding.
We can strengthen the Student Success Act’s goal of removing the federal government from our classrooms with this simple, common sense policy change.
States and taxpayers should be able to keep their dollars, opt-out of federal education programs without repercussion and focus on the needs of their students and communities.
Greater flexibility will yield greater accountability. A-PLUS would truly restore local control of education.
The status quo is failing our children and we need to ensure each child has access to a quality education and the opportunity to achieve their dreams.
Increasing local control of education and empowering parents and children through school choice initiatives is how we break these patterns and foster innovation in our school systems.
A-PLUS would restore state and local control of education and put parents, teachers and school leaders back in the driver’s seat.
JULY 6, 2015, 6:46 AM LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015, 6:51 AM
BY STEPHANIE AKIN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
The kids in the videos punch each other in the face. They pull each other’s hair. They roll on the ground while crowds egg them on. And it all allegedly happened in North Jersey, posted on a new Twitter feed that compiles apparent cellphone videos of young people fighting in New Jersey, with most of the altercations in Bergen and Passaic counties.
The fights shown on @BCountyFights take place in a high school chemistry laboratory, on a street lined with carefully manicured lawns, on the deck of a swimming pool. They are labeled by the location where the brawl allegedly occurred.
The feed’s reach – more than 2,000 followers – is expanding, with high school and middle school students saying they watch it in groups and talk about the latest video to post. And the catalog of fights is growing, with a collection of more than 75 videos posted since the feed went live on June 13.
“It’s like watching a boxing match, but with people you know,” said Brian Heredia, a 16-year-old rising junior at Hackensack High School.
Local school administrators and law enforcement officials, however, said the videos glorify violence and misrepresent their communities.
The feed doesn’t mention that in many cases the people involved faced criminal charges for their behavior. It also provides fodder for future prosecution: Several local police departments have assigned officers to monitor the feed. Although it is not illegal to film or post videos from public places, and Twitter doesn’t have any restrictions on content that viewers may find offensive, people in the videos can be liable for the actions documented in them.
JULY 6, 2015, 8:55 PM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, JULY 7, 2015, 7:55 AM
BY HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
North Jersey schools have made strides to improve graduation rates and narrow the performance gap among student groups of different races and income levels, state and national reports have shown.
Now concerns are being raised about how proposed changes to federal education law could impact progress in states like New Jersey. Officials and educators largely agree that the federal No Child Left Behind Act needs to be reformed, but they disagree on what a new law should look like.
Federal officials said Monday that proposed bills to overhaul the law lack the accountability needed to make sure struggling students get the help and investments they need, especially in the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools. The officials released a report showing that wide gaps still exist across states, despite improvements in graduation rates and achievement gaps.
“We have to make sure every state develops a structure to identify and help the lowest-performing schools,” Cecilia Munoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said in a phone call with reporters.
JULY 3, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2015, 8:56 AM
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Print
Housing projects would increase school enrollment
To the Editor:
It was hard to read the report in The Ridgewood News of July 26 (“Parents question increase in class sizes,” page A1) of classes with 24 children and the inability of the school board to guarantee that children will be placed in schools close to their homes, without marveling at the recent arrogance of the Ridgewood Planning Board in totally disregarding the concerns and testimony of taxpayers in this regard by passing the high-density zoning for which developers clamored.
These issues go hand in hand. The notion that school-age children will not cascade into these developments is ludicrous. Board of Education President Sheila Brogan is quoted in the article as saying, “Unlike surrounding towns, Ridgewood tends to support more students in our school districts.” Yet, as a proponent of the development on Broad Street, this obvious fact was nowhere in evidence.
The town can only hope that the full council is more attuned to the tremendous costs in traffic, taxes and school crowding that high-density projects will engender. Save the Village. Do not adopt this disastrous recommendation.
As “Pomp and Circumstance” plays at ceremonies nationwide this month, a record number of high school students are celebrating their hard-earned diplomas.
The celebrations won’t last. Despite their hard work, these students will soon find that they’re far from prepared for life after graduation. Academically, they’re worse educated than most of their foreign contemporaries. Occupationally, they’re ill-equipped for the jobs our economy needs. And emotionally, they’re less healthy than any generation in recent history.
America’s K-12 educational system is to blame. Despite huge advances in classroom technology and the science of learning, our nation’s schools remain a relic of another era.
Modernizing our schools isn’t just a matter of changing funding formulas and tweaking mechanisms for accountability. Instead, we must completely reimagine the American model of schooling, drawing on the science- and technology-driven practices that have revolutionized the modern world.
U.S. students are rapidly falling behind their international peers in primary and secondary education. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked countries based on the average math and science scores of 15-year-old students. America’s schools came in 28th.
Even worse, the OECD found that almost a quarter of American 15-year-olds failed to acquire “basic skills” in math and science. Of the 76 countries evaluated in the study, only Luxembourg performed worse.
This poor academic performance translates directly into inadequate workforce skills, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. Because of a lack of qualified applicants, companies take more than twice as long to fill STEM positions than equivalent non-STEM ones. The problem will only worsen. STEM positions are projected to grow 17 percent by 2024, almost double the rate of non-STEM jobs.
As if leaving students undereducated and unprepared for the workforce isn’t enough, current school practices are also making students psychologically unhealthy. The incidence of anxiety and depression among American adolescents has reached alarming levels. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly one in five high school kids contemplated suicide in 2013, many due to stress from school.
If we are going to reverse these dangerous trends, we need to completely change the way we teach our young people.
That starts by acknowledging that every student is different, and that the same student can be different depending on the week, the month, and the year. As a result, students need an education customized to their evolving individual needs.
This idea is far from new. Individualized teaching has long been recognized as superior to standard one-size-fits-all instruction. A 1984 study showed that individually tutored students, on average, performed better than 98 percent of students educated in a standard setting.
The problem is that such tutoring has long been prohibitively expensive. But with the advent of new technology, programs such as Khan Academy and Coursera are demonstrating that personalized, self-directed learning is possible on a large scale.
That could mean a classroom full of students using laptops or tablets to learn at their own pace. Or teachers using technology to closely track individual student progress so they know when to step in and help.
Once students master foundational core knowledge and skill requirements, they need resources and time to pursue their own projects, internships, and other opportunities for applied learning.
Rather than trudge through unnecessary extra English courses, a science-lover should be able to spend her time in the laboratory. By the same token, an aspiring writer should be encouraged to work on the novel kicking around in his head rather than taking unwanted extra science courses. It’s amazing what teenagers are capable of if they are given agency and a little direction.
Apart from academics, schools should address students’ emotional and social growth. For too long, a skeptical public has brushed aside concepts like socio-emotional learning as hippie nonsense. But in this case, the hippies have it right. Those who embrace these concepts experience very real, measurable benefits — including enhanced academic achievement.
For example, in January, Developmental Psychology published a study of grade-school students who were taught meditation and mindfulness techniques. After 12 weeks, the students showed a 24 percent decrease in aggression and an overall reduction in depression-like symptoms — plus a 15 percent improvement in math scores!
We’ve all winced at the numbers. U.S. students rank 17th, 26th, and 21st on the reading, math, and science portions of the PISA exam – well below many of their international peers.
But even while we recognize that these numbers are bad, many of us secretly reassure ourselves that such is not the case with the local schools which our children attend. Surely the American children struggling to keep up with the rest of the world are in other communities besides our own, right?
Not necessarily. As recent test scores demonstrate, students from well-to-do suburban and rural areas might not be doing as well as we imagine.
A case in point is the Kettle Moraine school district, located on the outskirts of Milwaukee. The district’s superintendent describes Kettle Moraine as “‘a very good school district.’” In this district, “only about 10 percent of the 1,300 students at Kettle Moraine High qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and about 90 percent are white.” And with the high graduation rates and ACT test scores which many of its students achieve, one would have to agree that Kettle Moraine’s students seem to be ahead of the pack.
However, Kettle Moraine recently had the opportunity to take the OECD Test for Schools, an exam which channels the official PISA test, but adapts it for individual American schools to see how competitive they are on the global stage. As it turns out, students from the high-achieving Kettle Moraine district weren’t leading the global pack in a key area. They were behind.
RHS Class of 1978 member Carrie McIndoe is running the program. Sounds like there is still time for some entrepreneurial RHS students. If not this summer, then keep the idea in mind for next summer.
Scholarships Available for High School Entrepreneurship Camp
Jun 24, 2015
Full Scholarships are available to the EntrePrep℠ Summer Institute, a one-week residential experiential entrepreneurship program for a diverse population of rising high school juniors and seniors. The program will be held July 12-18, 2015 at the University of Delaware, Newark and August 9-15, 2015 at Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY.
Program
In this intensive program, the participants experience being entrepreneurs. They work towards launching and operating their own Business-for-a-Day™, with over 20 hours of training and mentoring in support of this undertaking. They brainstorm, identify ideas and opportunities and develop them into their own Business-for-a-Day™.
They assemble the resources needed to launch their businesses and then run them. These young entrepreneurs deliver a ‘Concept versus Reality’ analysis in a final presentation before a live audience of their peers, mentors, local community and business advisors.
The students learn and implement economic/financial concepts and key life
skills, all required to create, run and evaluate their businesses. They experience the entrepreneurial mindset.
The program provides preparation for the future. The knowledge and skills students learn by this direct experience, helps prepare them for the world they are entering – one where understanding of economic concepts and financial literacy is a must and where most jobs are created by small businesses.
This is a unique opportunity to participate in a transformative experience.
For more information contact: Carrie McIndoe 917-650-3929 www.econventures.org
Those of us leaning in the Austrian direction see bubbles and malinvestments around every corner and assume, wrongly as it turns out, the market will right these wrongs lickety-split. But, for the moment a rational market is no match for cheap money. “Any college that is thinking about capital expansion, now is a very good time,” Robert Murray, an economist at Dodge Data told the Wall Street Journal. “Several years down the road, the climate might not be as good.”
Now being a good time because stock market gains have pumped up endowments, “and low interest rates have created a favorable environment for colleges to build,” writes Constance Mitchell Ford. The campus building boom marches on.
In 2014 colleges and universities commenced construction on $11.4 billion worth of projects, a 13 percent increase from the previous year. It’s the largest dollar value of construction starts since the heady days of 2008.
Ms. Ford’s piece highlights a $2 billion project at Cornell and sixteen new buildings at Columbia worth $6 billion. But here in Auburn, Alabama the campus has been a construction zone since 2008 when I arrived. Multiple new dorms, a basketball arena, a fancy student center, and various new classroom buildings have been constructed at a time when funding from the state has been cut back. What’s now underway is the largest scoreboard in college football, with a plan to expand the stadium next.
Back in the 1985–86 school year, full time tuition at Auburn for a non-resident was $2,585. Thirty years later it is now $28,040. That’s a compounded annual growth rate of 8.27 percent.
According to Bloomberg, college tuition and fees have increased 1,120 percent since records began in 1978, and the rate of increase in college costs has been “four times faster than the increase in the consumer price index.”
Tuiton at state schools is rising even faster says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He told Becky Quick on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” the cost of an education has risen 50 percent faster at state schools versus private in roughly the last decade.
Cappelli said a critical question is whether students will graduate in the first place, noting that only 40 percent of full-time students earn a degree within four years, and 30 million — and perhaps as many as 35 million — young adults do not finish their studies.
Unfinished college is as useful as an unfinished building.
College degrees are similar to what Austrians call higher-order goods. It’s believed a student will gain knowledge and seasoning in college, making him or her more productive and a candidate for a high-paying career. The investment of time and money in knowledge are undertaken for the payoff of higher productivity and a high future income. Higher education is the higher-order means to a successful career.
The assumption is those high-pay jobs, (A) will require a college degree, and (B) they will be plentiful when the student graduates. Borrowing $100,000 to earn a law degree is a malinvestment if the student ends up writing briefs for $15 per hour. A recent graduate of the Charleston School of Law put fliers on cars announcing that he or she had borrowed $200,000 to attend school and is now working at Walmart for $35,000 a year.
A post on the “Above The Law” blog revealed, “As of the 2013–2014 academic year, the total cost of a three-year J.D. degree from Charlotte Law was $123,792.00, while the median loan debt per graduate was $159,208.00. Just 34 percent of the class of 2014 was employed in full-time, long-term jobs where bar passage was required. …”
“More college graduates are working in second jobs that don’t require college degrees,” writes Hannah Seligson in the New York Times, “part of a phenomenon called ‘mal-employment.’ In short, many baby-sitters, sales clerks, telemarketers and bartenders are overqualified for their jobs.”
Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action,
The whole entrepreneurial class is, as it were, in the position of a master builder whose task it is to erect a building out of a limited supply of building materials. If this man overestimates the quantity of the available supply, he drafts a plan for the execution of which the means at his disposal are not sufficient. He oversizes the groundwork and the foundations and only discovers later in the progress of the construction that he lacks the material needed for the completion of the structure. It is obvious that our master builder’s fault was not overinvestment, but an inappropriate employment of the means at his disposal.
As it is now, parents and students still have the belief that college is the way to, if not riches, at least a well-paying career. In a 2011 piece for mises.org with what turned out to be the hasty title of “The Higher-Education Bubble Has Popped” I quoted PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who questioned the value of higher education. He told TechCrunch,
A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.
Like most bubbles this one is being fueled by debt. USA Today reports, 40 million borrowers owe $29,000 each, totaling $1.2 trillion outstanding. Student loan debt is easy to get, but hard to get rid of. It’s hard to pay back without a high salary, nor can it be bankrupted away. “Government either guarantees or owns most of the student loans and has the power to sue and to garnish wages, tax refunds, and federal benefits like Social Security when borrowers default,” Kelley Holland writes.
Defaults are plentiful. In the third quarter of last year, the three-year default rate was roughly 13.7 percent, with the average amount in default per borrower just over $14,000.
These debtors “are postponing marriage, childbearing and home purchases, and … pretty evidently limiting the percentage of young people who start a business or try to do something entrepreneurial,” says Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University
I administer funds for a small scholarship for graduating high school seniors in my old home town. This year, for the first time, an applicant wrote that he needed financial help for college because his father, a veterinarian, can’t help his children because he’s struggling to make payments on his own student debt.
The college boom is not just on campus. Student housing developers have been riding the college boom as well. Two years ago in a piece for The Freeman, I wrote about developers cashing in building dorms. These developers have even found Auburn, with its population of only 50,000. A project called 160 Ross has long-time residents in an uproar with its high density. But as much as locals don’t like it, students have snapped up units at $599 a bed.
That rack rate has large student housing developers coming to town and CV Ventures is ready to break ground for a six-story mixed-used project on just one acre featuring 456 beds, stumbling distance from the college bars, with a Waffle House across the street.
Meanwhile, everyday we hear about how online courses being the death knell for brick-and-mortar institutions. For the moment traditional colleges seem safe. “Because traditional campuses offer peer and teacher interaction,” writes Ron Kennedy, “as well as a plethora of other important benefits often sought by traditional, college-aged students, there will remain a need for traditional education.”
More importantly, Kennedy continues, “Research has shown that students who interact face-to-face with their instructors and other students tend to be more academically balanced than their online counterparts. This is one reason why most employers still prefer students who have attended traditional campuses.”
Trees don’t grow to the sky and neither will tuition. However, it’s doubtful young people will suddenly stay home with their parents and work toward degrees taking online classes. Parents who can afford it want to relive their college days vicariously through their kids.
JULY 1, 2015 LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 2015, 9:24 AM
BY MATTHEW SCHNEIDER
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Tensions were high last Monday night as a large crowd of parents gathered at the Board of Education meeting to voice their displeasure about various issues. The assembly was so large that additional chairs had to be laid out for the capacity crowd.
Parents packed last week’s Ridgewood Board of Education meeting to voice their displeasure over the increasing class sizes at some village elementary schools.
Many parents attended the meeting to protest increasing class sizes in some Ridgewood elementary schools.
Sheila Brogan, BOE president, issued a preemptive statement at the beginning of the meeting, saying, “I did want you to know that we have been listening. It has not been falling on deaf ears that people are concerned about the sizes of some of the classes in some of our elementary schools.”
This did little to mollify the crowd, however, as many went to the podium to express their displeasure and disappointment with the board’s handling of the issue.
JUNE 29, 2015 LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015, 2:52 PM
BY MATTHEW SCHNEIDER
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Ridgewood Schools Superintendent Daniel Fishbein sent out a letter last month in response to two incidents that took place in the district.
Incident at GW
The letter described the recent “swatting” incident that took place at George Washington Middle School, in which someone phoned in a false shooter threat that the school nonetheless took seriously for safety’s sake.
The incident forced the school into lockdown procedures, with the students hiding in classrooms and the teachers working with police officers to ensure safety.
“Unfortunate as the swatting incident was, it proved that our response plan is effective in this type of emergency,” Fishbein said. “The first Ridgewood police car arrived at GWMS within 39 seconds. Four municipalities responded swiftly in a coordinated effort. Some police were responsible to enter the building while others secured the area around the school.
“Our communication to parents and guardians went out as quickly as we had factual information to report,” he said.
Fishbein described the way that parents attempted to go to the school during the threat, and explained that they would be turned away until the threat had abated.
He also expounded upon the fact that the fire department’s phone lines were tied up by concerned parents inquiring about their children’s safety.
Fishbein expressed relief that Ridgewood police officers are trained in live-fire drills at the schools, allowing them to handle such situations with practiced ease.
How are these results positive? They were discovered during a false alarm, mitigating their potential for disaster and allowing the school to make the appropriate responses and adjustments for the next time such an event should occur, if one ever does, Fishbein said.
Incident at BF
The next portion of the letter focused on the recent incident between a former janitor and student at Benjamin Franklin Middle School.
Everything that the council is doing affects our schools
Schools are the largest part of our tax bill – that is a fact. That does not mean that the schools are not accountable.
It will be a gross overreach for the state to mandate full day kindergarten. I am starting to agree with Rick Perry that we need to abolish the Department of Education. Government is best which governs least.
Many parents actually enjoy spending the AM/PM with their children. We had activites and time with friends when the kids were in kindergarten. My kids did very well in elementary school, high school and college. Your kids will not go to Harvard because they had full day kindergarten.
NYC has preschool and middle school after care programs. The need for these programs in a city is not the same as for programs in Ridgewood. In the city the schools are the place where many students receive two meals a day and get health screening. Working parents do not have the time for homework and reading to the kids. Children need the time in school as a social safety net.
I paused my career to be home with my kids and never regretted it. If working parents need babysitting then they should hire someone. My taxes should not go to support someone’s child care needs. Maybe dad/mom can work from home or with flex time. You will never look back and say that you wished that you spent more time at work.
In the Ridgewood News today ther is a story about a large turnout at the BOE meeting, complaining about class size.
In the same meeting someone complained that we do not have full day kindergarten. ( They somehow ignore the fact that the district will need more space and have to hire more teachers. One complains about the needs of working parents. I do not want to permanently share in the child care expenses of working parents. They work so they should pay for kindergarten enrichment classes if they think that their children need this to get into college)
We pay very high taxes, mostly for the schools. People keep moving to Ridgewood for the schools. There is a disincentive for people without children in the schools to stay in town – and the cycle of postgraduation home selling continues. This issue has been discussed on this blog but I think that it deserves as much attention as the high density housing and parking.
The council and BOE should get together and do some master planning for the schools. We can’t keep up with the wants and needs of the parents, the town does not exist to please the parents of school children. Something has to give!
The council should consider a tax incentive for residents who have lived in Ridgewood X number of years and no longer have dependents in the schools. The spiral of selling homes after graduation needs to end. I will probably sell my 5 bedroom home in the next few years. A family with 4 children would love to have this house and pay my taxes for the schools. At a cost of $17,000 per student the town will start losing money immediately. I will not stay and spend my savings to help prop up this system.
Where is the Master Plan for Ridgewood Public Schools?
JUNE 24, 2015 LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24, 2015, 9:54 AM
BY DARIUS AMOS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Thanks in part to a large donation, learning at the Ridgewood middle school level is about to step into the future.
The Ridgewood Education Foundation (REF) has awarded an $85,000 leadership grant to the Board of Education to “kick off the renovation of science classrooms” at George Washington and Benjamin Franklin middle schools, according to REF Board of Trustees President Jennie Smith Wilson.
“This is much more about hands-on learning, understanding how things are made, learning by doing,” Wilson told The Ridgewood News last week. “Classrooms are outfitted for the old way of learning and teaching. Science classrooms match what learning was, not what it will be.”
According to Stacy Hughes, executive board member of the George Washington Home and School Association, the grant could not have come at a better time.
“It’s a generous gift for some well-deserving schools. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to create a hands-on, interactive learning environment for the kids,” Hughes said. “At GW, the classroom environment is a little antiquated, so this will be a huge and exciting change for the kids.”
Study shows ‘maths mastery’ experiment improved children’s scores in English schools after just one year
Schools in England experimenting with east Asian teaching methods have seen an improvement in children’s mathematics skills after just one year, according to a study.
The research, published on Thursday, which represents the first hard evidence that introducing a Singaporean “maths mastery” approach into English classrooms can influence results, found a “relatively small but welcome improvement” in children’s performance.
The report’s lead author warned however that the mastery programme should not be seen as “a silver bullet” and called for it to be tested over a longer period in a greater number of schools in order to build a fuller picture.
Policymakers have been studying teaching methods in east Asian countries such as Singapore, Japan and South Korea, which dominate the Pisa international league tables measuring children’s academic achievement. Children there are on average more than one year ahead of their western peers in maths.
The mastery programme differs radically from current maths teaching in England, with fewer topics covered in greater depth, and every child expected to master the topic before the class moves on. Teachers hold weekly hour-long workshops to discuss lesson planning.
The study, led by UCL Institute of Education and the University of Cambridge, evaluated the impact of a Singaporean-inspired teaching programme in 90 English primary schools and 50 secondaries where it was taught to more than 10,000 pupils in year 1 (aged 5-6) and year 7 (11-12).
After a year they saw a small increase in children’s maths test scores compared with pupils in other schools which was roughly equivalent to one additional month of progress over the academic year. The programme is designed to have a cumulative effect, with the full benefit evident after five years.
