Why test-based school reform isn’t working — by the numbers

[n2doc]

BY VALERIE STRAUSS

Award-winning Prinicipal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York has been exposing the problems with New York’s botched school reform effort for a long time on this blog. (You can read some of her work here, here, here, here, and here.) In the following post she looks at irrefutable data to show that the test-based reforms are taking public education down the wrong road. Burris was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. It has been signed by thousands of principals teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens. You can read the letter by clicking here.

By Carol Burris
There is an adage that says: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” That is certainly true.

It is equally true that if you know where you want to go, but continue to take the wrong road, you will soon get hopelessly lost.

The first is an accurate description of reform without any standards.

more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/23/why-test-based-school-reform-isnt-working-by-the-numbers/

[elleng]

1. Thanks. Carol Burris is principal of my high school,

years after I graduated. The school's doing as well now as it was years ago, fortunately, and all public school systems should take what she says to heart.