Yesterday, LEV co-founder Lisa Macfarlane testified on the Race to the Top bill (Senate Bill 6696). Below are the talking points for the testimony she gave at the Senate Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee.
LEV’s Jan. 25, 2010 testimony on SB 6696
Lisa Macfarlane, with the League of Education Voters and Excellent Schools Now Coalition, a group that includes 27 organizations dedicated to meaningful education reform that increases student achievement, closes achievement gaps and prepares students to be college and career ready.
We applaud this legislation. It takes a number of steps in the right direction. We have provided you with an analysis of the strengths of this bill and where the places where it needs to be strengthened. I’d like to quickly highlight four areas where we’d like to see changes:
1. It is critically important for OSPI to develop one set of statewide measures of student growth and insist that school districts use it.
2. Student growth data needs to comprise at least 50% of teacher and principal evaluations.
3. It’s a good thing that the legislation directs OSPI to develop four-tiered evaluation models for teachers and principals. We think it’s important to add language that school districts should be required to use one of the 4 tiered models developed by OSPI or get specific approval to use an alternative one.
4. Lastly, we think it’s critical to provide extra pay for teachers who work in high poverty, high minority, or low-achieving schools, or hard to staff subject areas, –who demonstrate effectiveness in raising performance and closing achievement gaps.
All this work that the Race to the Top competition is driving across the country has a national context. Our country used to lead the world in college success. We have lost that lead and our US dept of Education has a very explicit goal of restoring that college success leadership by 2020.
And in our Washington, we have a math and science achievement crisis, and achievement gaps that are GROWING
- Gap in NAEP 8th grade math scores between low-income and non-low income Washington students is growing. It is now 28 points, which is almost 3 years. This gap is the 12th largest in the nation in 2009.
- Also on NAEP 8th grade math, Washington is 1 of 9 states where the White-African American gap is growing, and 1 of 7 states where the White-Hispanic gap is growing.
These sobering realities are a call to action and a reminder that we ALL need to own the performance of our schools and students.
The anchor in school improvement work is student growth data which is why we are insistent that it be a state responsibility to develop these measures. All of this focus on evaluation is about improving instruction, which is all about supporting teachers in their professional growth.
When we do that– and we realize that funding education is not an expense, it’s an investment — we will close our achievement and opportunity gaps.
Race to the Top and its 4 priority areas are not trial balloons for flavors of the month. This focus on college and career ready standards,
great teachers and leaders, using data to improve instruction, turning around lowest performing schools is right on the money and it’s clearly the priority of the US department of education.
We need to “assure” that we are making progress on these four priorities to get the rest of our fiscal stabilization money.
We expect Race for the Top to be the new frame for the re-authorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Future Title One School Improvement Grant money requires that districts use one of the four turn-around models specified in the legislation before you.
If we make these legislative changes, and then put together a bold, coherent Race to the Top application, we could win significant new federal money.
Regardless, it’s the work that we need to be doing if we want to accelerate school reform and boost our state’s economic recovery. We are not going to have a strong, vibrant economy if we don’t do a better job of preparing our children for college and careers.
Yes. Win federal money (as some children lose theirs). Prepare students for college and careers (who cares about art or civics, anyway?) It’s all about economic recovery because it’s certainly not about the whole child.
Make them good little producers. Teach them to compete for dollars. Measure them on a simplistic scale of standards. Blame teachers, not the community. When they don’t measure up, it’s the teachers’ fault, not the community’s.
Where did real education go in all this? Are we reducing children to standard cogs in the machine?
We have met the enemy and he is us.
ach.