Showing posts by
Dan French.
Show all
Educators, parents, students, and community members are eager to create a new education landscape in which the primary focus is on creating engaged, collaborative learners, readers, writers, problem solvers, and creators.
Dan French reflects on how performance assessments seek to overthrow established power structures in education. Articles from the latest issue of Voices in Urban Education provide inspiration for further thinking.
As a movement, personalized learning holds great promise. In short, audacity need not be the enemy of the practical. By drastically reshaping our ideal schools to better represent the “educational hubs” that support personalization, we open more possibilities than we close.
The Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment seeks to redefine the measures of student learning. The consortium believes that “In this day and age, we need to re-conceptualize assessment rather than tinker to refine a testing model that has limited value in furthering public education,” and that the best way to assess student learning is to return the role of designing assessments to those closest to students – teachers.
"...in this past year we have experienced many victories in the struggle for a more just public education system. The growth of youth organizing groups signals that the new generation can be a powerful voice in the movement toward equity and excellence in the public schools."
Question 2 was voted down by a wide margin on November 8th, but now is not the time to become complacent. Moving forward, we need to work harder than ever to ensure that our public schools are equity-minded spaces for all children.
Through more than 20 years of No Child Left Behind, we have lived with a uniform definition of accountability, that of a standardized test used to make determinations of student learning and school and district progress. It is time to question some of the assumptions underlying this practice.
