NCLB is based on holding schools, teachers and students accountable through the use of high stakes standardized tests. Bush is currently trying to extend this approach to high schools.
Meanwhile in New York, a group of exemplary public schools, several of which are among the original schools in the "small schools" movement, are in the middle of a fight to retain their powerful alternative assessment program, one that measures things you would really want students to know. They need your help, today! Please join their email campaign below.
The following is an Action alert from the
Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) , a network of more than 1000 schools dedicated to "to creating and sustaining equitable, intellectually vibrant, personalized schools and to make such schools the norm of American public education."
Dear Friend of CES,
The CES Center in New York City urgently needs your help. CES National urges you to support the following request from the New York Performance Standards Consortium:
Dear Colleague:
As many of you know, our CES schools in New York pioneered the use of a performance-based accountability system in lieu of high stakes standardized tests. The New York schools have been engaged in a seven year battle with our State Department of Education to continue using a waiver from the state standardized tests that was granted by the previous state commissioner.
Many of you have visited our schools, seen our work, and attended workshops that we have offered at Fall Forum. For our schools to continue working well we need to roll back high stakes testing policies and continue using our performance-based system.
Recently, with help from national experts ( Linda Darling- Hammond, Stanford, Michelle Fine, CUNY Graduate Center, and Joe DiMartino, Northeast Regional Lab at Brown), we proposed that New York State adopt a system of multiple measures that would include performance-based assessments, a minimal number of standardized tests (to meet the requirement of NCLB), attendance, grades, and teacher assessments.
Obviously such a proposal has national implications. If we are successful in New York, there may be hope for schools across the country to adopt more effective assessment strategies. Now we need your help to communicate to the Regents how important our schools are to the national conversation about effective education.
Please click on the link below to send an email to the Regents and to the State Assembly Education Chair Steven Sanders urging them to renew our waiver.
Thanks very much in advance for your support.
Click this link to send a letter