Stanford prof calls cops on Berkeley prof who exposed her $5K/hr consulting fee
nypost.com
nypost.com
1. California Math Framework ch1: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter1.doc...
2. California Math Framework ch2: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.doc...
3. A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction stride 1: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
4. One of Boaler's papers that claims that detracking improves achievement, even for the top performers. See if you are convinced the conclusions follow from the experimental data.
[pasting a message I wrote a long time ago - i haven't checked the links are still valid]
The paper starts out quite strong and grabs the reader's attention with this: "Everyday, we accumulate more evidence that humans are destroying the planet". It then goes on to cite something called "Nahua metaphysics", which is I'd agree is crucially important in the teaching of mathematics to children.
Glance through this, it is less readable than "Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
Absolutely terrifying that someone like this is at a prestigious university working on "education research".
"Unlike Hatcher’s goals, I choose to privilege the view of a Nepantlerx—seeing the interconnectedness between Indignenous and Whitestream knowledge of mathematics. I choose the term Whitestream instead of European American to highlight the role of global White supremacy in the enterprise of mathematics education."
Current mathematical education is white supremacist. Of course.
I looked up the author's salary at UIUC -- 122,438.00. Impressive!
If you can’t count it, you can’t analyze it.
• There is a greater focus on getting the "right" answer than understanding concepts and reasoning.
• Independent practice is valued over teamwork or collaboration.
• Contrived word problems are valued over the math in students' lived experiences.
• Students are tracked (into courses/pathways and within the classroom).
• Participation structures reinforce dominant ways of being.
So they state that science is racist and white. Clearly shows the problem with US education, decades behind scientific nations.
> Boaler is behind the ongoing effort to change the math curriculum framework in California that includes, in part, increasing equity, pushing algebra 1 back to 9th grade and applying social justice principles to lessons.
Every time I hear anything about math education in the US, I leave convinced that "professors of education" should have nothing to do with it. And this opinion doesn't have anything to do with contemporary politics, since as far as I can tell, they've had a malign influence for at least a century (e.g. math education in the US was dumbed down by the "education experts" in first half of the 20th century, until the requirements of the space race and cold war forced a turnaround in the 60s).
What do you think the outcome will be in aggregate? I’ll bet my hat it does nothing to produce better outcomes while furthering the race-influenced class divide. We literally have 4 living generations of people who’s only lasting association with math is “that thing that was needlessly hard and useless.” It’s the education equivalent of peacocking. It says nothing about you other than your family circumstances afforded you ample time to waste. Nobody remembers a damn thing about Trig, Geometry, Formal Proofs, or Calc unless they went on to a STEM field where they kept the knowledge fresh and even then they were still retaught it all in college anyway. But let me tell you everyone remembers the stress.
I say this as someone who has two degrees in math and tutored half my damn class just to get them through trig and calc. High school math is garbage and pointless. “Oh but it teaches you how to think analytically.” The hell it does, the nuggets of creative problem solving are buried in mountains of rote memorization and bullshit trivia.
If you want to raise the tide for all ships I would just do two years of algebra so people actually understand it completely instead of rushing them to the next thing only to flail for 4 years barely keeping their heads above water and then just stop. Then let people who are genuinely passionate about maths (or need it because they want to do calc based physics which would also be optional) opt in to that track, and crucially, don’t reward it in any way except as “nerd extracurricular” so people aren’t pressured into it.
Giving up on math is giving up on the future.
I want a world where people come away not afraid of maths and feel like they can use it as a tool to solve real problems. But that doesn’t happen unless you sit with the material for a while. What you see as dumbing down I see is actually having a whole generation of people understand and remember algebra which is way better than we have now.
It wasn't until years later I saw something online that showed two right triangles stacked on top of each other forming a rectangle. And then further illustrations on how you could bisect triangles of other shapes to make two right triangles that you could double up to make rectangles. Then it was obvious why you had to take the formula for a rectangle's area and divide it by two for triangles.
Similar visualizations are useful for other shapes too. But for some reason (unless I spaced out during that lesson) this was never brought up in any high school or college math class.
Im from the Uk, went a state school, with a Masters in Engineering, and a father who was an Engineer. My perspective is that the curriculum that I grew up with failed to properly teach me maths. Further, as much as I don’t personally like some of the policies implemented in the US education system (positive discrimination), I find myself agreeing with some of the policy/curriculum changes suggested.
The largest difference between myself at university and my peers who went to paid or selective schools was that they knew how to learn. This was the hardest but most valuable lesson I learned from my prof in my first year. I remember trying my hardest, and in hindsight trying to learn in the most ineffective ways- copying out of textbooks. Seems stupid ? But that’s essentially how I was taught maths at school from 2000 to 2010 at school.
I can see 100% how upbringing currently has an outsized impact on maths attainment, far beyond other subjects. - and the impacts on social justice.
I don’t expect a 9 year old to do complex algebra but the fact that you can do math with placeholders is definitely within their grasp.
It's hard if you want to do it prior to 8th grade let alone 6th grade, and that isn't even the most challenging part of what Algebra involves; you might as well just teach them Dragonbox and hope they all grok it. The common approach of introducing algebraic thinking gradually via complex word problems has very much stood the test of time.
That's a straw-man, no one wants to make math education that aggressive.
> What do you think the outcome will be in aggregate? I’ll bet my hat it does nothing to produce better outcomes while furthering the race-influenced class divide.
If you dumb down math education, you will probably just end up "furthering the race-influenced class divide":
http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html:
> Modeled on Summerhill, and supported by the challenges at that time of structures of authority, both within education and the larger society, "free schools" proliferated, and eventually helped give rise to the Open Education Movement. The Open Education Movement was nothing new; it was just a repetition of progressivist programs promoted in the 1920s, but the idea of letting children decide each day what they should learn at activity tables, play corners, or reading centers, was once again promoted as profound and revolutionary.41
> The effects of the Open Education Movement were particularly devastating to children with limited resources, due to their lack of access to supplemental education from the home, or tutoring in basic skills outside of school. Lisa Delpit, an African American educator who taught in an inner city school in Philadelphia in the early 1970s wrote about the negative effects of this type of education on African American children. Relating a conversation with another African American teacher, she explained, "White kids learn how to write a decent sentence. Even if they don't teach them in school, their parents make sure they get what they need. But what about our kids? They don't get it at home..." Summarizing the effects of the open classroom movement from her perspective in 1986, Professor Delpit wrote:
>> I have come to believe that the "open classroom movement," despite its progressive intentions, faded in large part because it was not able to come to terms with the concerns of poor and minority communities.42
> Another prominent educator, Nancy Ichinaga, came to similar conclusions about the effects of the Open Education Movement on low income students, based on her experience as principal of Bennett-Kew Elementary school, in Inglewood, California. Ichinaga began a 24 year career as principal of Bennett-Kew in the Fall of 1974, one month before scores from the California's standardized test were released. At that time the school included only grades K-3 and it was called Bennett Elementary school. Bennett's 1974 third grade students ranked at the third percentile in the state, almost the absolute bottom. The school was then in its fourth year of the "Open Structure Program" and the student body throughout her tenure as principal was nearly 100 percent minority and low income. Reacting with shock and dismay at the test scores, Ichinaga confronted the teachers who admitted that their program was not working. The entire student body was illiterate and the student centered mathematics program was in shambles.
> With the collaboration of her teachers, Nancy Ichinaga introduced clearly defined and well structured reading and math programs which included practice in basic skills. After a few years, test scores increased to well beyond the 50th percentile, and by the end of the 20th century, her school had earned national acclaim and became a model for others to emulate.43 At an education conference held in May 1999, Principal Ichinaga described the situation in her school in 1974:
Education didn't dumb down. Students now learn robotics, foreign languages, and advanced laboratory sciences in good districts (and even some of the crappy large ones like LAUSD). The good ones learn more advanced topics, and at a younger age, than people in previous generations.
There are simply many more students than there were before, so while the performance of the good ones got better, and there are more of them, the average performance got worse.
Mostly, they didn't need to. A good quality junior-high education could feasibly reach what today would be high-school standards. And such was all that was needed for the kind of manual work that would've been common prior to the advanced factory manufacturing that only became common post-WWII.
> There are simply many more students than there were before, so while the performance of the good ones got better, and there are more of them, the average performance got worse.
This might most accurately describe the performance of teachers, not just students. If really good teachers are inherently very rare, then average performance might indeed get worse as numbers increase. What one could raise issue with though is the recurring claim that modern educational methods are more effective than earlier ones. There's simply too little evidence for that theory.
And therein is one of the bigger problems.
> The prescriptions for the future of mathematics education were articulated early in the 20th century by one of the nation's most influential education leaders, William Heard Kilpatrick....
> Reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, Kilpatrick rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism. Kilpatrick proposed that the study of algebra and geometry in high school be discontinued "except as an intellectual luxury." According to Kilpatrick, mathematics is "harmful rather than helpful to the kind of thinking necessary for ordinary living." In an address before the student body at the University of Florida, Kilpatrick lectured, "We have in the past taught algebra and geometry to too many, not too few."9...
> In the 1940s it became something of a public scandal that army recruits knew so little math that the army itself had to provide training in the arithmetic needed for basic bookkeeping and gunnery.24 Admiral Nimitz complained of mathematical deficiencies of would-be officer candidates and navy volunteers. The basic skills of these military personnel should have been learned in the public schools but were not.25 As always, education doctrines did not sit well with much of the public. Nevertheless, by the mid-1940s, a new educational program called the Life Adjustment Movement emerged from the education community. The basic premise was that secondary schools were "too devoted to an academic curriculum." Education leaders presumed that 60% or more of all public school students lacked the intellectual capability for college work or even for skilled occupations, and those students would need a school program to prepare them for every day living. They would need appropriate high school courses, including math programs, that focused purely on practical problems such as consumer buying, insurance, taxation, and home budgeting, but not on algebra, geometry, or trigonometry. The students in these courses would become unskilled or semiskilled laborers, or their wives, and they would not need an academic education. Instead they would be instructed in "home, shop, store, citizenship, and health." ...
> By 1949 the Life Adjustment Movement had substantial support among educators, and was touted by numerous federal and state education agencies. Some educators even suggested that in order to avoid stigmatizing the students in these programs, non-academic studies should be available to all students. Life Adjustment could meet the needs of all American students.26
> Progressive education was forced into retreat in the 1950s, and even became the butt of jokes and vitriol.29 During the previous half century, enrollment in advanced high school mathematics courses, and other academic subjects, had steadily decreased, thanks at least in part to progressive education. From 1933 to 1954 not only did the percentage of students taking high school geometry decrease, even the actual numbers of students decreased in spite of soaring enrollments. The following table gives percentages of high school students enrolled in high school math courses.30
But that wasn't the end of it:
> The NCTM Standards reinforced the general themes of progressive education, dating back to the 1920s, by advocating student centered, discovery learning. The utilitarian justification of mathematics was so strong that both basic skills and general mathematical principles were to be learned almost invariably through "real world" problems. Mathematics for its own sake was not encouraged. The variant of progressivism favored by the NCTM during this time was called "constructivism" and the NCTM Standards were promoted under this banner.54
> ...Criticisms of educational constructivism, as in this article, were not well received by the education community. In an address before the California State Board of Education in April 1997, Hirsch described the treatment of this paper. "After a so-called peer review, Educational Researcher turned down the article, and agreed to print only a section of its critique of situated learning. This decision would have been unremarkable except that the three authors of the article happened to be among the most distinguished cognitive scientists in the world, John Anderson and two other colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, Lynn Reder, and Herb Simon. The latter happens also to be a Nobel prize winner."56
This is a significant point that's unfortunately buried in this article. Progressive ideology prior to the 1960s or so was extremely bigoted, what we would nowadays call classist, sexist and racist; it went hand-in-hand with the promotion of things like eugenics. (Some people might even convincingly argue that the toxic bigotry is very much still there beneath the shiny surface, but that's beside the point here.) So this attitude that intellectual thinking should be explicitly discouraged in the bulk of the student population was actually quite functional to that sort of authoritarian ideological stance. The meaningful question is how on Earth it is still considered proper for Ed-schools to focus entirely on this sort of garbage, and neglect actual, useful direct teaching of students at all achievement levels. We expect "college for all" but drop the ball re: teaching the sort of traditionally-valued skills and attitudes that would enable that underserved 60% of the population to do good work in college.
https://mobile.twitter.com/boazbaraktcs/status/1511366075035...
Wonder if there were kickbacks involved, or just incompetence.
I was once paid 3,500 for a single 15 minute talk. It took me about 5 days to read various technical materials and condense them into an executive summary that could be delivered in 15 minutes. There were about 100 people in the audience. They got excellent value for money and I got paid reasonably for my research.
The Berkeley guy volunteers for free, just for the record.
Many people (including me) are furious about the CMF, because it's based on inaccurate and/or misleading research and citations, makes little sense, and will harm students (and disproportionately harm students whose parents can't afford tutoring or private school). Hundreds of math and engineering experts have signed petitions against it.
I've heard that there are laws against being both the author of state standards, and selling consulting about those standards. I don't know the specifics of these.
Someone posted a Tweet including (i) an agreement between Jo Boaler and a school district, for PD presentation at $5k per hour, and (ii) a school board resolution agreeing an amendment to the total on that contract (doubling the contract value, whilst keeping the # hours unchanged). Their objections were (i) that's illegal due to #3, and (ii) the amount of money could fund almost a whole year's teacher salary, and that would be more valuable. A Berkeley professor retweeted the Tweet. The Tweet he retweeted contained public records only (the agreement, and the school board resolution) and did NOT contain any personal details about Jo Boaler except for her name.
That professor had previously tried to engage with Jo Boaler about the framework, including by asking questions during a Zoom presentation. She ignored him.
Jo Boaler sent a threatening letter to the professor (i) implying that she had contacted the police about him retweeting the content, (ii) accusing him of disseminating private info and misinformation, and (iii) saying he could have just reached out to her.
He posted the letter on Twitter.
She went on a PR offensive making it seem like she's a victim, when she was the (only) one who made a threat.
It's a booming market, it would be surprising if more people didn't choose to pursue the social justice pulpit for a living with that sort of comp rates.
I'm sorry Professor, but you need to call the Twitter police, not the Berkeley police.
1. She claims that studies show that detracking improves student outcomes for all students, including the strongest. The cited studies mix a number of interventions, so it's impossible to draw the conclusion that detracking caused the increase in performance.
2. She attacks a straw man when she talks about the 'elitist construction of math'. I don't believe her characterisation that many/most people believe that math ability is genetic.
3. The talk of open-ended 'Low floor, high ceiling' tasks sounds nice in principle. But I challenge you to come up with a task that would work for people spanning 5 grade levels's of math ability (like the 6th graders at several schools in the Bay Area), and that a median California math teacher could supervise effectively.
4. No, there's no rule that says, if you group kids by ability, you can't provide differentiated instruction within each classroom.
5. If high school math achievement is used as a gatekeeper for college admissions, and this reinforces inequity, the answer cannot be to hold some students back. Rather, we should improve early math education so that people can all progress. Even if it's true that folks who study calculus in high school end up studying it again in college, this doesn't indicate they didn't benefit from that high school exposure.
6. The five strides of Equitable Math (https://equitablemath.org/) (recommended in the California Math Framework 2021, Chapter 2), is NOT a good guide to improving math teaching. Its characterisation that every problem with math education is the cause of 'White Supremacy culture' is plainly wrong. Many of those problems exist in places like China, and it's hard to claim that's also a result of white supremacy. I highly recommend reading Stride 1 on that web site.
7. She pushed some changes at San Francisco Unified School District, the main one of which was moving Algebra I from 8th grade to 9th grade. She and the district claimed great success, and published some misleading stats. I won't go into the reasons why those stats are misleading here. But just look at what happened to those students when it came time to take the SAT. The first cohort of students who did algebra in 9th grade had a 10% lower pass rate on the Math SAT than did the previous cohort (61%, down from 66%). This is on the public record: you can request the aggregate data from CA Dept Ed (it used to be online, but they took down the page, as they don't care about SAT results now that UC doesn't look at them).
“… after she allegedly threatened to call the cops”
- Her hourly rate is closer to $400/hr. The Berkeley guy said it was $5k/hr because he just took the total pay and divided by hours spent on one thing. But she spent hours on some other things too that he didn't included in the denominator.
- He originally tweeted her address and other harassing things, which is against Twitter's rules. That tweet was reported and taken down.
- Stanford has threat prevention staff that alerted her to his tweets and also alerted the authorities, as is apparently their policy when people are tweeting harassing stuff about their faculty. She never personally reported him to the police. I wouldn't fault her if she did though.
- It's clearly not racially motivated.
- Despite all that, she tweeted an apology to appease the mob.
- Finally, I don't like either of them. He is a harassing doofus who is trying to make her seem racist. She is trying to dumb down math for California students in the name of equity. He's worse but I don't really like her either.
> Her hourly rate is closer to $400/hr. The Berkeley guy said it was $5k/hr because he just took the total pay and divided by hours spent on one thing. But she spent hours on some other things too that he didn't included in the denominator.
Her official hourly rate is 5,000 USD an hour. She claims she does ~10 hours of preparation for that single hour so she's really only charging ~400 USD an hour. You can believe her or not, up to you. The claim that she's charging 5,000 USD an hour is not incorrect and is there in her contract.
> He originally tweeted her address and other harassing things, which is against Twitter's rules. That tweet was reported and taken down.
He did not tweet out her address. The person he retweeted had a separate tweet where they shared her address, and that was deleted by that person.
The rest of your bullet points are based off of her clarification letter. The email Nelson shared very much includes a threat of police and lawyers.
Now perhaps that is a misleadingly drafted document, or the full agreement provided a variety of free services as well, but on its face, it seems reasonable to assume she is charging $5k per hour since that is how she is phrasing it in contracts she is signing.
> Provide four (4) two-hour sessions at the rate of $5,000.00 per hour for a total of $40,000
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-math-...
"The Oxnard district training or others like it don’t include only the time in front of teachers or at the district, but also about 18 hours of preparation, Boaler said, which isn’t specified in the contract. The deal also means significant travel time."
It's not uncommon for consulting to work that way where you pay $X for a report and a couple hours of presentation but theres a bunch of behind the scenes work you're implicitly paying for too.
So her effective rate was probably a little over $1k/hr. Doesn't seem that unreasonable for a Stanford prof.
If you believe that (e.g. if you think the sessions are heavily customized for each school district, and not just the same thing at each place), then you'd divide the 5k by 11+1, getting $417/hour.
How hard did you actually look? It wasn’t him.
Article: “The person who put out the initial tweet — a high school teacher in San Francisco — had shared Boaler’s home address in a separate post, but later deleted it and apologized. Nelson said he did not post her home address on his Twitter account”
Now you are just lying. He tweeted the page of the PDF that showed her payment $40,000 for 4 2-hour sessions.
Someone else tweeted the next page of the PDF, where she puts her address for the check. Page 377 of https://t.co/w0RapmD5bG
This is untrue.
I moved abroad two years ago but is this how the US is nowadays?
That said, the 5000 USD hourly fee reminds me of the old maxim that "the best disinfectant is sunlight". She obviously does not like the fact that this price tag for her services is now widely known.
This is how you fight corruption and similar vices. Transparency.
I am white but was almost killed by the LAPD in 2011 so anecdotally I can tell you, the evil cops don't really focus on color - it's more about power.
It seems that without the racial aspect, there wouldn’t be much of a story left, apart from a “Karen” story comparable with what one would find on Reddit.
yes. this is the US nowadays. but tbh, its always been this way imho.