Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

A diverse group of over 60 educational leaders representing a variety of organizations, from academic institutions to state boards of education and from foundations to education providers, released an open letter today calling for the states and the assessment consortia designing the next generation of assessments aligned to the Common Core to move with all haste to deploy an assessment system that not only explicitly accommodates emerging models of innovative schooling, but also supports them.

"John King recently resigned as New York state's education commissioner after a tumultuous tenure in which he helped create and implement a controversial education evaluation system and rushed the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and aligned testing. (He is now going to work as a top assistant to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who apparently thought the controversy that King created was just fine.)  That evaluation system, known as APPR, required that 20 percent of an educator's evaluation be based on student standardized test scores. Now, New York Schools Chancellor Merryl Tisch wants to make new changes. What are they and why would they take a flawed evaluation system from bad to worse? This post explains."

"Beverley Holden Johns, a nationally recognized expert in the field of disabilities, strongly disagrees with Arne Duncan. Duncan wants children with disabilities to be able to perform on the highest level of NAEP tests. She points out that NAEP was not designed for this purpose. Duncan unilaterally changed the requirements of the IDEA act, without Congressional authorization. Having changed NCLB without Congressional authorization, he must think that ignoring the law is routine. In Néw York, we learned how students with disabilities do when they took the Common Core test: 95% failed."

"In a move seen by some activists as a concession to Chicago's strong anti-testing movement, Chicago Public Schools won't administer the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a test required by federal mandate as part of the new Common Core curriculum. Instead, the district will test only 10 percent of its 664 schools."

"Has the company that produces many standardized tests gained control of our education system?"

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, has released its final content frameworks for the common standards. And the newsiest thing about the document is this: The consortium is going to create content frameworks for grades K-2.

"When charter schools first emerged twenty years ago, they represented a revolution, ushering in a new era that put educational choice, innovation, and autonomy front and center in the effort to improve our schools. While charters have always been very diverse in characteristics and outcomes, it wasn't long before a particular kind of gap-closing, "No Excuses" charter grabbed the lion's share of public attention. But in this rush to crown and invest in a few "winners," have we turned our back on the push for innovation that was meant to be at the core of the charter experiment?"

The two consortia-which, you probably recall, are working with federal Race to the Top money-have released documents that shed a bit more light on what the tests might look like when they're fully operational in 2014-15. We say "might" because there is a very long road to travel between these documents and the final tests-lots of tweaking, field-testing, revising, reviewing. But the accumulating stack of documents offers interesting glimpses.

Slides: Public Hearing on the Implementation of Race to the Top and Federal School Intervention Models in New York City

So, this all has me wondering if the real objective here - among advocates of these seemingly contradictory policies - is actually to make traditional public schooling so utterly unbearable for both teachers and students by expanding the testing and standards driven culture, expanding curricular standards across areas previously untouched, sucking any remaining creativity out of teaching, and mechanizing the teaching workforce in traditional public schools, making even the worst of the less-regulated alternatives seem more desirable for future generations of both teachers and students?

We teachers have been hearing for years about "differentiated instruction." It makes sense to treat individuals differently, and to adapt communication toward what works for them. Some kids you can joke with, and some you cannot. Some need more explanation, while others need little or none. If you consider students as individuals (and especially if you have a reasonable class size), you can better meet their needs.

Thirty years ago, a Reagan administration report warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." The report, "A Nation at Risk," tied that mediocrity to the alleged failure of America's schools. Fast forward to 2012, and the story hasn't changed, former New York City schools chief Joel Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in a report provided to The Huffington Post slated to be released Tuesday. "The sad fact is that the rising tide of mediocrity is not something that belongs in history books," said the report produced by a Council on Foreign Relations task force they co-chaired. The report, called the U.S. Education Reform and National Security report, argues for treating education as a national-security issue, noting that deficiencies in areas like foreign languages hold back America's capacity to produce soldiers, diplomats and spies. It calls for increased standards, accountability and school choice -- charter schools and vouchers -- to increase America's international educational standing.

The central idea behind standards- and accountability-driven reforms is that, in order to improve student learning, we need to do three things: Clearly define a minimum bar for all students (i.e., set standards). Hold students, teachers, and leaders accountable for meeting those minimum standards. Back off: Give teachers and leaders the autonomy and flexibility they need to meet their goals. It's a powerful formulation, and one that we've seen work, particularly in charter schools and networks where teachers and leaders have used that autonomy to find innovative solutions to some of the biggest instructional challenges. Unfortunately, in far too many traditional school districts, the push for greater accountability has been paired with less autonomy and more centralized control. That is a prescription for a big testing and accountability backlash. 

State Education Commissioner John King Jr., 36, took his post in June at a pivotal time for education in New York. King is overseeing the implementation of education reforms at a time when school districts, and his own department, are financially strapped. During an exclusive interview last Friday, Education Reporter Meghan E. Murphy asked King about the top issues facing the state today: from school funding disparities to criticisms regarding the state's teacher evaluation regulations.

A total of 1325 elementary, middle and high schools and 123 districts statewide have been identified for improvement under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.  Of the identified schools, 1173 will receive Title I funds in 2011-12 and are required to offer extra help to eligible low-income students; 416 of these Title I schools must also offer public school choice (as appropriate) to all enrolled students. 

Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

"Below Dov Rosenberg lists what he considers the 10 most inaccurate and damaging statements that some school reformers toss around. Rosenberg, who loves to help teachers use technology, has been serving North Carolina public school students and teachers for 11 years as a teacher and instructional technology facilitator."

Secretary Arne Duncan is right about the No Child Left Behind law: It is an unmitigated disaster. Signed into law a decade ago by President George W. Bush, NCLB is widely despised for turning schools into testing factories. By mandating that every student in the nation would be "proficient" by 2014, as judged by state tests, it set a goal that no nation in the world has ever met, and that no state in this nation is close to meeting. The goal is laudable but out of reach. It's comparable to Congress mandating that every city, town, and village in the nation must be crime-free by 2014 ... or their police departments would be severely punished.