Types of Standards

For Students

Content
Assessment
Performance
Opportunity to Learn

For Teachers

Licenses
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

For implementation

Sanctions
Incentives
Capacity Building

Fuzzy v, Traditionalist: The MATH WARS under Eastin.

Standards à Matrix (Standard) – (Test items - Does it test the standard? How many items?) Wanted scientifically scored (mult choice)

In CA – State Board of Ed reads whole test and determines Basic-proficient-failing points. NCLB has to have proficiency standards, not norm-reference percentages. Child versus school as the unit of accountability. When it was school accountability you could sample kids at the school and use that as the score.

LA had it’s own compensation schedule in addition to the state’s bonus for NBPTS

Aligned professional development system: Can be costly, and if done incorrectly (as it usually is!) then useless.

SAT comes out of an area of psychological testing after WWI when you wanted to decide who would go into the army and who would be in the kitchen cooking. The GRE’s a souped-up SAT I – it’s bullshit, too. If it’s horrendously bad, we’ll take notice, but moderate to upper ranges – we don’t do much with it at all.

You do your self-study and they accredit you mostly on your self-study results – accreditation is pretty much bullshit too.

The choice advocates that are more reasonable say, yeah, I like standards based reform, it’s just long and hard to do and is almost never done right, we’d rather trust to the market,

Non-bridge overheads:

Theory of Action of Results-Based Accountability Policies

Focus Attention

(of educators/public) on outcome goals through:

Targets
Planning
Consequences

Enhance Motivation

To improve:

Identification/labeling process
Consequences (rewards and sanctions)

Develop Capacity

(Educator and school)

External Assistance
Allocation/reallocation of resources

All this leads to Improved Instruction, which leads to Improved Student Achievement

The way people are trying to reach standards is through longer scheduling, block periods. If you’re on the margins (arts, music, voc ed), you get cut.

Have we got it right? I don’t know. Time will tell – we’ve bet the store on this, all the states are into it.

Effectiveness Framework:

1990s Standards-Based Reform

To be effective, reforms must influence classroom instruction(improved instruction will lead to increased pupil performance)

To be effective, reforms must incorporate knowledge about effective practice (e.g. classroom teaching)

To be effective, reforms must have a theory of instructional improvement

To be effective, reforms must link capacity of educations to implement the reform, incentives, and coherence.

Consequently, education policy research must have a top/down and bottom/up focus.

External reforms lead to: No response, high fidelity, mutual adaptation, school invents its own reform.

NCLB is essentially a K-8 program; it has no high school strategy.

Group work

Erin, Pamela, Alice, Nara Vaughan

Kindof did on the surface, but didn’t really once you got into all the changes you would have to make to align it to all the different standards

They had their own standards-based system in place.

Scope of the testing – normed test, not testing every student

Their short-term capacity to deal with these questions was inadequate

Labelled “low-performing” before mandated interventions of NCLB.

Assume parents will take advantage of opportunity to switch schools – only active parents may act.

Because state tests only identified low-performing schools, not low-performing students, unable to target interventions to students.

Something is problematic about the segregated schools and the ethnic makeup of the program/resources (95% of low performing schools in two minority-heavy districts.)

Accountability: Schools not students, norms not content, no sanctions in their system, proficiency levels set high (5 different performance levels)

Were reporting subgroups, but not at the same level NCLB required, or weren’t associating sanctions with them.

Didn’t look at anything outside the scope of what was in the case.

Erin: Keep the test and expand it to all the levels

Pamela: Compeletely overhaul everything

Short term they should do #2 and in the long term do #1 (covering grade 2)

What does the third option do?

What should he do about proficiency level in the short term? Lower requirement for proficiency (Erin) so that you can focus your resources on a smaller number of needy schools. Pamela says do nothing, don’t know what’s going to happen, wait a year and see - in long term set it low so there’s room to grow

Strategy for dealing with low-performing districts: Instruction and intervention

No capacity or resources to deal with this right now.