Freddie deBoer:

I’ve said this before: let’s have an academic decathlon. You choose a team based on whatever pedagogical criteria you want. You can choose students from public school or private, unionized teachers or not, parochial or secular, from charter or magnet, from Montessori or KIPP or whatever else you want. However, I choose the demographics of the students on your team. For my team, the situation is reversed: you choose the pedagogical factors for my students, but I choose the demographics. You stock your team kids from whatever educational backgrounds you think work, and mine with whatever educational systems you think don’t work. Meanwhile, I give you all children from the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden inner city and impoverished rural districts where we see the most failure. I stock mine with upper-class children of privilege. I would bet the house on my team, and I bet if you’re being honest, you would too. Yet to accept that is to deny the basic assumption of the education reform movement, which is that student outcomes are a direct result of teacher quality.

NCTM 2013 is on us in two weeks.

1. It’s a banner year for speakers. I’ll post a few recommendations shortly but you have all the usual institutions plus a few new upstarts from the blogosphere. I’m looking forward to it.
2. It’s a very expensive ticket. No two ways about that.

So if you’ll be attending NCTM, consider recapping a session or two for MathRecap.com. A photo and a few paragraphs is all it takes to open the conference up to the 99% of math teachers worldwide who can’t attend. Leave your details at the volunteer page if you’d like to help them out.