When asked publicly or privately about high stakes assessments for teachers and schools, we always say the same thing: don’t go there. Using value-added models based of student test scores to reward or punish teachers misdiagnoses educator motivation, guides educators away from good assessment practices, and unnecessarily exposes them to technical and human testing uncertainties….
As educators, we talk about data, collect data, wade through data, analyze data, and draw conclusions from data that hopefully demonstrate how and why our interventions led to the achievement of our goals. But sometimes there seems to be so much data, so many things we could measure, that it’s difficult to know where to…
Understanding key changes as NCLB evolves into ESSA. When President Obama signed the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, into law, we had two reactions: 1) Finally! Congress and the President Obama have at last replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and 2) Holy cow!…