An Arkansas win, a KU loss, and so far I'm dominating my cousin in fantasy football today.
I'm looking forward to Arkansas pulling off a huge upset next weekend against Alabama -- taking my dad to the game which will be great (he's an alumni).
Alright, now off of sports and onto the issue I want to bring up today: School reform. I spent my Saturday in Nashville at the Stand for Children Education Reform Summit with a great group of parents, students, educators and public officials. The day started at 4am as I had to catch a bus to the conference at 5am! After the 3 hour bus ride we listened to a great panel about how teacher effectiveness is being looked at as part of the formal evaluation process for teachers each year. We are lucky here in Tennessee to have amazing data that has been kept for almost two decades (TVAAS), which is a great start. The main concerns that were heard both from teachers and students was how the students need more opportunities to show mastery than just one test at one time of day. Students spoke out about how they would like to have multiple opportunities to show mastery. The public officials on the panel to implement teacher effectiveness spoke about how it takes too long to get the data back for it to be effective - as data analysis and teacher linking is blocking the quick use of the data to make decisions on teacher effectiveness before the next school year. Possible solutions such as doing the teacher linking before the tests instead of after and having students take the tests online so that they could be graded and analyzed much more quickly were discussed, however there are technological readiness issues in schools that would keep that plan from being put in place.
I also sat in on a discussion about how to effectively lobby for education reform on the state level. There was a lot of information that was similar to how I had experienced things when I interned for Congressman Moore (KS-03), such as being flexible and keeping your arguments succinct. One thing that I think we all need to do is work harder at making our public officials routinely abreast of how much we are ready for education reform. If education reform is something you are passionate about perhaps you should consider targeting 10 state legislators in your state to keep tabs on and write to/call to make sure they know how you would like them to vote. Don't just focus on your own legislator - find out who they typically vote with and begin to write to them as well so that you get a group of legislators discussing this in familiar company.
I think my major takeaway from the conference was that educating the public on what is happening and educating them on how to access the avenues that are in place to help make changes is the most important thing we can focus on right now. Talk to your neighbors and encourage them to support education reform.
Other than the conference the week was great! We had an exciting time discussing the development of Maryland and the Carolina's and are moving into discussing the economic differences between the New England/Middle colonies and the Southern colonies.
The 7th graders are still examining human impact on the environment. After last week's look at fossil fuels and their extraction we are moving on to wind and water currents this week! We're even going to be using our longitude and latitude skills as well as time zone skills to track a hurricane!
I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their weekends, I know I will as I continue to destroy my cousin in fantasy (up 77.44 to 35.7 right now!).