Shulla-Cose and Day’s bet on social-emotional education now looks prescient. Other educators and academics across the country have come to agree that content knowledge isn’t enough to prepare students for life after high school. Several of the nation’s most highly regarded charter school networks, like KIPP and YES Prep, came to this conclusion after taking a hard look at their data. These schools were rock stars under a No Child Left Behind school accountability system that rewarded them for getting high numbers of mostly poor black and Latino students to pass state math and reading tests. But they were finding that too often their students were unable to translate those test results into college success. Now, in addition to teaching students fractions and conjunctions, many educators are increasingly grappling with how to address social and emotional skills like collaboration and students’ sense of belonging.
Going forward, it’s likely standardized tests will play a much smaller role in how schools are evaluated. The passage of new federal education legislation, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaces No Child Left Behind (NCLB), gives state policymakers new authority to redesign accountability systems. Under ESSA, states are now required to incorporate non-academic measures.
Janet Hale on 25 Apr 10"Overview: The 3 R's TEP is designed and structured around the belief that teachers are the key personnel in achieving educational success for its students. In singling out teacher quality as the essential lever in educational reform-as opposed to other reforms such as class size reduction or pre-packaged curricular models-TEP builds on an extensive body of research that shows that "teacher quality is the most important educational input predicting student achievement." [i] The effects of highly-effective teachers are profound for students at all ability levels, but they are particularly striking for low-achieving students. Studies demonstrate that, when learning from the most effective teachers, high achieving students improve by 25 percentile points (as compared to a 2 point gain with the least effective teachers), while low achieving students improve by more than 50 percentile points (as compared to a 14 point gain with the least effective teachers). [ii]"