Hey, look! It's one of my favorite wonks, Tony Venhuizen, director of policy and communications for the Governor, talking with School Administrators of South Dakota exec John Pedersen about the governor's proposed education reforms:
Some highlights:
- [5:50] Pedersen asks Venhuizen if the Common Core Standards and training therein, increased standardized testing, a state-mandated uniform teacher evaluation system, and (most importantly) bonuses (boni!) for all math and science teachers and the best-ranked 20% of teachers in each school will improve student achievement. Venhuizen says that the data show that the status quo is producing results that beat national averages, but they aren't showing any upward trend. I brace for some serious wonk evidence... but Venhuizen just says the governor "really believes" his plan will make a difference.
- [7:50] Pedersen says that when he was superintendent at Pierre, he found career and technical education professionals even harder to recruit than math and science teachers. Pedersen asks if we ought to consider incentives for other important, hard-to-fill teaching assignments. Venhuizen says math and science are key to CTE, but notes later that the governor is offering "a plan, not the plan" and hopes to draw lots of discussion. O.K.: how about incentives to help hire really hard-to-find foreign language teachers?
- Pedersen says that when he served on the statewide committee that developed our new standards, educators were assured the state would still allow local districts to implement their own teacher evaluation instruments. Now Governor Daugaard wants to impose a statewide system. Venhuizen assures us that all stakeholders—administrators, teachers, parents—will have a chance to participate in crafting the new statewide evaluation instrument. However, says, Venhuizen, if we're going to use teacher evaluations for state-funded bonuses and spend millions on training in teacher evaluation, we have to have a uniform state system of teacher evaluation. We're going to train all these people in a statewide system, so we'd better have a statewide system... does that sound circular to you?
Are students only going to be taught to pass a different standardized test to fulfill the wishes of our governor?
Michael,
The answer is yes, Also, some textbook company in Texas will be paid $1,000,000 to create the test
Tony is a unique individual.
DD needs a course in basic statistics. Can we bubble test him on this stuff?
He's concerned about "no upward trend." Such a trend would be nearly impossible to show for the pool of South Dakota students within a larger pool of national students whose states are also improve. If everyone is improving, you're going to stay locked in at where you are. If education is in free fall everywhere else and it is failing at a slower rate in South Dakota, we'd see an upward trend relative to other states, but I don't think that's what DD is aiming for. What you can say is South Dakota is maintaining it's above average scores at about the same relative level in the face of national efforts to improve education.
I'm not sure that any of the national tests could ever show much of a trend.