This article from Ed Week fascinates me. It contains quite a few good ideas, expressed very generally, and then ends with the whole implementation problem.
Here’s an excerpt:
For many teachers, formative assessment has traditionally consisted of quick checks for understanding, Friday quizzes, or exit slips as students head out the door. But as the majority of teachers around the country transition to the Common Core State Standards—which are designed to emphasize complexity, critical thinking, and skills like collaboration and reasoning—some experts say more teachers need to deepen their assessment practices. In other words, they need to begin seeing themselves, like Lozano and Cardenas, as teacher researchers.
I don’t think it matters much how many good ideas the present system comes up with. Very few of them are actionable in a centralized control system that gives so little authority to teachers, local communities, and parents. In order to prevent the inevitable local failures and to establish justice and equality for all, a system is put in place that only shrinks the number of people who are very well served and guarantees that the best ideas will be swallowed by parasites who thrive on centralized systems.
Well, we learn what we can.
