Articles & information about testing & accountability
Educational Accountability 3.0: Beyond ESSA - This report by the National Education Policy Center, et al., outlines what a more effective and equitable approach to the assessment of student learning and accountability for schools and districts might look like.
Measure What Matters - This website from Raise Your Hand Texas provides information about the Texas assessment and accountability system and ideas to build a better accountability system.
Stop Privatization: Potential solutions to the inequities caused by the billionaires’ push to privatize education in Denver Public Schools - This is the last article in a five-part series on the privatization of education with an emphasis on Denver Public Schools by Mike DeGuire, public education advocate and A4PEP board member (it contains links to the other four parts).
Charter Schools
A4PEP has many concerns about charter schools. Please read more here: Issues with Charter School Law (1993-2021)
Laws on District and School Turnaround
State laws govern what is to be done with schools and districts on "turnaround" status. See what the laws are here.
Community Schools
One of A4PEP's priorities is promoting COMMUNITY SCHOOLS, especially for schools with lower ratings on the state accountability system. Learn about them here. A4PEP also sent a letter to La Voz explaining how community schools could be a benefit to Adams 14 and other "low-performing" schools with a high proportion of minority and high-poverty students.
A4PEP has many concerns about charter schools. Please read more here: Issues with Charter School Law (1993-2021)
Charter Schools
There are reasons a number of reasons the Finnish education system is often the top performing education system on the planet on the international tests. We often hear that they treat their teachers like professionals, well paid, respected, and with high standards for even getting into a teacher training program, but there are two additional differences that go unmentioned.
1. Their children start first grade two years older than we do in the U.S. Their children are simply more mature when they start school.
2. Their language gives them a great advantage. Specifically, they have a 26 letter alphabet, just like us, but they only have 26 phonics rules. Each letter has one and only one sound anywhere in their language. American English has nearly 1,000 phonics rules. They can teach their children to read at a 90% accuracy level in about half a year. It takes us two and a half years to reach the same level of accuracy.
The data is in this article from the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, entitled
Synthetic Phonics and Learning to Read: A Cross-language Perspective, by Usha Goswami.
The article can also be found at: Educational Psychology in Practice,Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2005, pp. 273–282
Research Reveals Long Term Harm of State Pre-K Program
In this first-ever controlled study of public pre-K, the control group did best.
In this post in Psychology Today, Peter Gray, Ph.D. describes research that reveals the consequences of pushing literacy learning objective down into the pre-K age group. The short digest of the studies is that pre-K children who get intense academic training perform better in the first grade, but they display increased incidence of learning disorders by the fourth and sixth grade. Read the full article here.