SOS Position Papers
Better Assessment
For a printable (PDF) version of this document, click here,
“Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn’t a high-stakes test. It wasn’t a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn’t even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn’t study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize.“Too often what we’ve been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we’ve said is let’s find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let’s apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let’s figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let’s make sure that that’s not the only way we’re judging whether a school is doing well.“Because there are other criteria: What’s the attendance rate? How are young people performing in terms of basic competency on projects? There are other ways of us measuring whether students are doing well or not.” ~President Barack Obama
It’s clear there are many problems with our current assessment-for-accountability regime. Even our president– whose administration’s policies have encouraged a huge increase in the amount of testing students experience– has said that we need to rethink how we approach assessment and accountability.
Curriculum
For a printable (PDF) version of this statement, click here: Curriculum
One question, THE question, which has yet to be asked by Congress, is this: What are the goals of education in America? In other words, what do we wish to accomplish? That question should have been asked before Congress reauthorized ESEA as No Child Left Behind in 2001. Until Congress asks that question — and answers it – NCLB should not be reauthorized. President Bush and Congress did not ask THE question in 2001, and that is why NCLB has turned out to be such poor legislation.
Curriculum is the road map we use after we have answered the question: What are our goals? Curriculum tells us what our children should learn in order to achieve our goals. What should they know and be able to do by the time they graduate?
Equitable Funding
For a printable version of this statement, click here: Equitable Funding
With the creation of No Child Left Behind in 2003, the United States Department of Education has inserted itself into across-the-board education policy creation and even into individual classrooms. The role of the federal government in education should be limited to two things: economies of scale, and assuring equity for all American children.
Our schools are the stages where the real values and goals of America are played out every day. True democracy and equality under the law are meaningless unless we provide our children with the tools to participate fully in American life and citizenship.
Family Involvement
For a printable version of this statement, click on the title: Family Involvement
When parents, teachers, students, and others view one another as knowledgeable partners in education, a caring community forms around students. ~Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
We’ve all heard it before — “parents are important,” “parents make a difference.” Parental involvement or engagement, pick your terms, it doesn’t matter. For too many of us, these are just words strung together making empty statements. And lawmakers set the phrases down in law, as if that will reform dysfunctional districts.
