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Dan French.
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Sixty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the Court’s decision, stating that “…in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” It was a seminal moment in public education at the onset of the Civil Rights era. Sixty-five years later, are we still making progress?
MCIEA alone is not enough. We need a grassroots movement, in Massachusetts and across the nation, of educators, parents, and community members that come together to advocate for new accountability systems at the local, state, and national levels that engage students and promote self-reflective school improvement.
Dan French shares remarks on the Pilot schools movement at the 2018 Teacher Powered Learning Conference.
Performance assessments - assessments that ask students to apply their learning in new, real world ways - are a critical measure of learning for mastery education. Within this system, performance assessments enable students to show what they know and are able to do in many different ways.
The Holmes School has fared poorly in past years on the state’s standardized test. However, this assessment is based on a single measure which is most closely correlated with parental income and race. What is going on inside the school is exciting. While most schools experiencing these results might double down on test prep in English language arts and math, the Holmes has chosen a different, radical route.
We need to rise up and work with legislators, state education departments, boards, and other policymakers for a radically new vision of education accountability, with teachers at the forefront of creating assessments that promote the deeper learning we want for all our children.
We live in a country rife with institutional inequities that create language, income, race, gender, able-ness, and sexual identity divides that make it extremely difficult for young people to gain traction to follow their dreams and aspirations. It starts with education.
