Student Learning

Several questions are raised in regards to student learning: 
the conditions necessary for a quality education include a 
credentialled teacher who has continued his/her 
professional learning with professional staff development, a 
single vision adopted by teachers, administrators, parents 
and clearly promulgated so that everyone in a school setting 
knows what the goals are, the books, equipment and other 
necessary resources to achieve those goals, and finally a 
learning environment that is clean and well-maintained. 
2) We ask students to keep their options open.  However, 
some of the proposals close those options by not allowing 
students with different modalities of learning and acquiring 
knowledge to have a "rigorous and challenging curriculum." 
When business people and others use these words that 
believe that the only true course is to have a single 
curriculum, i.e. college preparation without regard to the 
other career-technical and, yes, vocational education that 
some students desire.  However, we should not be like the 
European system in which we have students take their 
'elevenses' which directs students either to college prep or 
vocational education.  Students must be freely able to 
choose from a wide variety of curriculum choices while 
being prepared to learn a core curriculum.  Otherwise, if we 
only have college prep courses, we will be seeing students 
drop out at a younger and younger age; those who have 
difficulties without adequate remediation and tutoring, will 
feel hopeless.
We do not expect less of students not prepared either 
through course work or the ability to fund a college 
education, however, we have not included career-technical 
and vocational education choices in our high schools.  
Those latter areas have not been funded. 
Recommendation 21:  Diagnostic assessments are part of 
every good professionals repertoire. We have gone 
overboard on the assessments for accountability purposes 
rather than assessments that target areas for remediation 
and learning.  I totally, agree, with recommendation 21.3 that 
the use of authentic assessments are necessary rather 
than norm referenced tests. 
Recommendation 28:  The problem with trying to quantify 
and assess various indicator is that the science of 
psychometrics is not yet sophisticated enough to get the 
nuances of human behavior down to numbers.  Teacher 
and professional observation often tells us more that the 
numbers in an API or Opportunities for Teaching and 
Learning Index.