More accountability and standards
I would like the next president to return to the intent of accountability and standards. That is to set standards and hold schools accountable for meeting them, and then get out of the way. As long as they are meeting the standards, they should have freedom to be innovative and creative.
Our experience with NCLB and Reading First has been a nightmare of micromanaging and constricting mandates that have forced creative teachers to return to textbook teaching. For example, the Feds came up with a regulation for 90 minutes of uninterrupted reading instruction for Reading First schools. The state of Florida then mandated this for all elementary schools. This resulted in numerous schools having to drop our highly successful Project CHILD program because they could not schedule uninterrupted blocks for the CHILD rotations. (The CHILD model is a cross-grade team approach where teachers specialize in the core subjects and work with their students for three years – see our website for more atwww.ifsi.org) Despite superior results for the CHILD classes, the scheduling requirements came first. This doesn’t make sense.
This post was submitted by Sally Butzin.
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