- Does the method prioritize the Goals? (SMART)
- Does the method follow PDCA?
- Does the method have enough carrots and sticks to motivate people to be willing to accept and promote change? And make hard decisions?
- Does the system ensure the gap is not closed by lowering the top scores?
What else should I be looking for? Will this new system work?
Also, I link some comments regarding RDALE's take on the info.
G2A PDCA
G2A SMART
MN Dept of Educ MMR Release
MN Dept of Educ New Accountability System
MN Dept of Educ Federal Accountability
MN Dept of Educ NCLB Waiver Site
ZLE Rated One of the Top in MN
RDALE Poised for Growth
AHS and CHS on Top HS List
4 comments:
By all means do whatever reading you find necessary, but I only had to read through the first paragraph to see the words "NCLB waiver" to recognize this as Obama's dictatorial bypass of Congress, intended to keep his NEA buddies from looking bad. Somewhere around the third paragraph it becomes obvious that the whole purpose here is to eliminate penalties for under performing schools and to substitute more incentives – i.e. funding – for doing essentially nothing. You can use as many "carrots" as you want, but without "sticks" you're unlikely to get someplace that the education monopoly does not want to go and has proven itself incapable of going. The other documents in your stack talk about all of these "evaluations" and "ratings" but they don't say anything specific about HOW these are going to lead to improvements. Since it is evident that schools do not KNOW how to close the achievement gap or improve overall academic performance, or they would long ago have done so, all these measurements will do is tell us how bad the situation continues to be, year after year, while we lose another whole generation of Americans to our deeply flawed and overly expensive public education system.
J. Ewing
We've seen this Lucy and the football ruse how many times now? We enact rigor in various forms and levels and as soon as embarrassment looms on the horizon, they are relaxed, delayed, repealed or granted a waiver. Move along, there are no carrots or sticks to see here.
Related to this post on high-stakes testing. . . This is an interesting look at testing in Minnesota. One of the creators of NWEA/MAP tests (which are vastly superior to MCAs, imo) talks at some length at what standardized tests do well and what they don't.
http://www.minnpost.com/learning-curve/2012/06/student-testing-pioneer-angermeyr-skeptical-about-high-stakes-trends
--Annie
I'll create a post around this soon to give it some attention. Remember that I encourage guest writers. So what else would you like to accompany the link?
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