Diane R. goes to Texas
by pureparents
From PAA founding member Karen Miller:
When I found out Diane was speaking at the school board/administrators convention, I asked her if she’d extend her stay and she agreed to remain an extra day. Lorie (Barzano, of PAA affiliate Coalition-SAUS) did a fantastic job with local arrangements, including a parent/teacher/community meeting at a high school in a low income area subject to takeover. I’ll let her describe that wonderful event (see below). We worked closely with the school board/administrators associations as well as the Texas AFT and their local affilliate
Diane arrived on Saturday afternoon and met with some of the “fighting profs” from UT on issues related to high stakes testing. Read her blog on that meeting here.
That evening, she met with 40 superintendents for dinner, many of whom are involved with a pilot program in which a select group of high-performing districts — which were chosen to reflect the wide variety of schools in Texas and represent about 250,000 of the state’s almost 5 million public school students — will be given flexibility in turn for the opportunity to explore ways to innovate upon current practices, with an emphasis on digital learning and reducing the number of assessments students take.
Following Diane’s keynote speech and very popular book signing, we attended a TASB legislative brunch
