As students prepare for graduation at Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS), a high school of 450 students in an East Harlem neighborhood in New York City, they work intensively to prepare a portfolio of their work that will reveal their competence and performance in fourteen curricular areas. This portfolio will be evaluated by a graduation committee composed of teachers
California’s Center for School Restructuring is working on an “accountability, learning, and support” system to help the state’s demonstration schools that have received special funding for restructuring. The long-range goals of the demonstration schools and districts are to “provide powerful learning outcomes for all students” and to invent “an authentic system of accountability.” To help schools give an honest accounting
Half our life is spent on internal accountability-talking about whether this or that piece of student work is good enough,” says Paul Schwarz, co-principal of Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) in New York City. “But because we gave up using standardized tests and the accumulation of Carnegie units in favor of exhibitions and portfolios as a way to graduate
To the Editor: As someone working with the Coalition and with the National Network for Education Renewal (NNER), I was pleased to see your attention to the critical issue of teacher education [September] 9931. I applaud your choice of the University of Southern Maine and the University of Louisville efforts as exemplars. While you made important points concerning the professional
Everyone agrees we need high standards for school improvement. But who should set them and how? How will we tell if schools are meeting them? What part can Essential Schools play in this crucial public debate? Going to school and taking tests has lots in common with an airline pilot’s job, Harvard education professor Dick Elmore has observed: “long periods
New York was once heavily committed to large-scale testing on two tiers (standardized Regents Competency Tests and more challenging subject-area tests that led to a Regents Diploma). But the state’s New Compact for Learning, adopted by its Board of Regents in 1/91, has galvanized state policymakers into a new push that will ultimately give responsibility for individual student assessments to
In Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992) Ted Sizer uses the efforts of the fictitious Horace Smith and the faculty of Franklin High School as a framework for considering various aspects of school reform . The following is an excerpt from the book. [One] obligation of the state is to solicit, assert, and assess the
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report, issued in 1991 on the heels of the Bush Administration’s national goals statement, placed student learning objectives within the context of a real environment-the competencies and capacities that “today’s high-performance employer seeks in tomorrow’s employee.” Teaching and learning the following competencies, the report argued, must become the
State education department efforts to draft new standards and assessment plans vary widely, influenced by a variety of pressure groups. To help sort through the important differences among plans, the following questions may prove useful. Will the state test every student for comparison and selection purposes? Or will it sample random students using matrix sampling methods for the purpose