I recently read two great
quotes that really landed with me, one published by Make Education a Priority
(MEaP) in a Facebook post and another I saw on Facebook by Rita Pierson. For those who have not seen the quotes, here
they are.
MEaP – “I care more about the people my students
become than the scores on the tests they take.”
Rita Pierson, Educator – “Every child deserves a champion; an adult
who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and
insists they become the best they can possibly be.”
These two quotes, certainly
augmented by many other social media posts that focus on the student, put the
emphasis on where it should be in public education, on the students
themselves. While I saw (but then
couldn’t find) another post that really reinforced this message, it was along
the lines of asking students how they are doing rather than relying strictly on
tests as a barometer of success.
But that’s just not the way
that we do it. We continue to think that
a system of high stakes assessment is the best way to gauge how well our
students are learning. And while that is
a helpful resource, it should not be the only way that we evaluate the success
of public education. There are just too
many variables (socioeconomic status, single family households, ESL, etc.) that
have an impact and there is no way to normalize results for these
variables. Yet we continue to focus on
STAAR results with an eye now toward moving to an A-F rating system in school
year 2017-2018.
If we step
back for a minute and really care about how all of this impacts students and
teachers, we might come to a different conclusion about what our students are
learning and how we might better approach this.
Many parents are now using fears and concerns about high stakes testing
to opt of these tests (subject of a future blog). And there is a very recent report published by
the National Conference of State Legislatures (ncsl.org) titled No Time to Lose: How to Build a World Class
Education System State by State. In many states, business-as-usual just isn’t
achieving the goals and enabling students to achieve their potential. We have to change that but also need to
understand the gaps between business-a-usual and the desired state of
education. Asking students is a good
starting point for that effort.
A great example of where student input is important can be
found in the second tenet of the report, that there needs to be greater
emphasis (and funding) on career and technical education than there is
today. In my household, my son is a
great example of where a CTE program might have helped him find his way once he
graduated from high school. Six months
after high school, he knew exactly what he wanted to do and he is approaching
twenty years with the same company … but he had to find that on his own. Asking him while he was a public education
student would have been of great benefit to him.
Great quotes and the emphasis on the "outside in" from the market place/stakeholders.
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