Mo. gets waiver from No Child Left Behind
Article from STLtoday.com:
When state test scores are made public later this summer in Missouri, the information will be missing a label used to judge schools here and across the country for nearly a decade.
Missouri education officials are moving ahead with changes to how they keep schools accountable after Friday’s announcement that the state had won a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014.
What is known as “adequate yearly progress” will disappear from Missouri’s test score results, and instead, schools will be held to a single state-developed accountability system. As part of the waiver, Missouri agreed, for the first time, to evaluate teachers partly on the performance of their students and give priority to the state’s worst schools.
“Our system will focus on improvement, not just labeling,” said Margie Vandeven, assistant commissioner at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. For parents, it means a “more accurate report on the success of their school,” she said.
The state department said that hundreds of parents and students gav…………………continues on STLtoday.com
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Austerity measures should not compromise children’s education
Article from The News-Press:
In this era of fiscal austerity, some policymakers seem to believe that we can lay off teachers and raise class sizes without any adverse impact on the educational outcomes for children. The most recent example is that of Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, who ridiculed President Barack Obama’s proposal to help states and cities avoid laying off teachers and first responders.
In his education policy speech last month, Romney argued there was no evidence that smaller classes made a difference in Massachusetts. In his book, he even suggested that the effort to reduce class sizes might “hurt” education.
But Romney and others like him make critical mistakes when they draw conclusions about the relationship between smaller class sizes and student achievement: They simply relate the observed class sizes (or worse, pupil-teacher ratio) in schools, districts or countries with high achievement levels. Indeed, this was the approach the consultants at McKinsey took in their analysis of class sizes, which Romney cited in his book.
The problem with this approach is that it ignores the reality that educational leaders a…………………continues on The News-Press
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