They are also supposed to examine school funding to determine if that played any role in the low performance. Under ESSA, states must identify those schools performing in the bottom 5% of their accountability system and then intervene with evidence based solutions. But it is not clear to me how it complies with ESSA. The indicators are meant to give families a fuller picture of school performance than test scores alone. McQueen recently told the task force advising her on testing matters that the numeric system will still provide useful information about how schools are doing in areas such as chronic absenteeism out-of-school suspensions student readiness for college, career and the military and a variety of student achievement and growth data. Dolores Gresham, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, says the numeric system “is not ideal, but it does allow for some accountability and fulfills our requirement” under ESSA.įederal officials are expected to approve the numeric rating concept and a few other revisions on Tennessee’s updated ESSA plan shared last month with the U.S. They were very creative and ambitious,” said Gini Pupo-Walker, who leads the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition, which seeks to improve education quality for students of color. “I give the department credit for going much further than I thought they could or would based on the TNReady law. McQueen’s approach is drawing mostly praise from education leaders and groups, even as some wonder whether a numeric system will provide the simplicity and clarity of one that grades schools on an A-F scale. She believes it also complies with the Every Student Succeeds Act, also known as ESSA, the 2015 federal law that requires every state to adopt a rating system that distinguishes each of its schools in a meaningful way. The state will rate each school on a scale of 0-4 on six different performance indicators. And in a major concession to local district leaders, schools won’t receive a single overall grade or rating as initially planned.Įducation Commissioner Candice McQueen said the change complies with a new state law ordering that this year’s TNReady scores “shall not be used to assign a letter grade to a school” - a nod to concerns that the test results may be unreliable. Now the state Education Department has come up with a different approach to help parents and communities understand how their schools performed in 2017-18. Chalkbeat Tennessee reports that the state has tossed out its A-F grading system for schools-the system that the US Department of Education previously accepted as a proper plan to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act. Tennessee just came up with its solution. Without valid test results, how could the state run is federal accountability system that requires it to rate schools, identify those in need of intervention, and report back to Washington? In today's world, it meant huge legal problems. In a bygone era, this would have amounted to nothing more than a waste of time and money. The problems were so severe and ongoing that they eventually invalidating the results of the tests. For weeks, the system basically crashed or malfunctioned. This year, they became stressful for high ranking officials. Standardized tests are normally stressful for students and their teachers, particularly when the test are high stakes. This Spring has been unusually stressful for the Tennessee education system and its officials.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |