You have seen this comment in previous blogs, but it bears repeating: public education and schools in Virginia have been subjected to various solutions, practices and theories designed to improve public education and the schools. To date, these approaches to resolving the issues for improving student learning and understanding, equal learning opportunities for all and promoting the goal for all students to graduate from high school have just not proven successful.
So, you may ask, what else is new? In Virginia, what is new is about to take on a new meaning for unecessary and not welcome. The Virginia State Board of Education is on the brink this week of formally adopting the legislative policy of grading schools based on selective criteria. Passed by the General Assembly in 2013, all public schools in Virginia will be assigned a letter grade, A-F, through the Virginia School Grading System.
It seems that the Commonwealth is following suit along with other states in the country: legislative acts designed by politicians to improve the American education system. According to Marc Tucker, author of “The American System For Improving Our Schools,” the “American “system” for improving the performance of our schools is bizarre and judging by the results, very ineffective.” The process for measuring school effectiveness in Virginia is also headed down this path.
In his blog, Tucker notes that the efforts to improve schools has produced a “result that is a teeming assortment of unreleated initiatives, unrelated to each other and unrelated to the overall analysis of the needs of the system endorsed by the people responsible for our schools”…aka division superintendents, principals and classroom teachers.
You may read Tucker’s blog at: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/10/the_american_system_for_improving_our_schools.html?cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2
