Edutopia - April/May 2008 - (Page 42)

oDouglas Christensen Assessment maverick ouglas Christensen, Nebraska’s state commissioner of education, is gifted with a maverick streak of common sense that is not only changing public schools in the Midwestern state, it’s also getting the attention of educators throughout the country. An early critic of the high-stakes testing dictated by the No Child Left Behind Act, Christensen told Time magazine last year he had informed the U.S. Department of Education that “we had a better way.” Since 1999, he has been acting on that bold claim by implementing a very different approach to student assessment. To assess their progress, Nebraska’s students in grades four, eight, and eleven complete a statewide exam that includes a written essay. In some school districts, that assessment might also include projects, demonstrations, and oral presentations. Nebraska’s teachers are free to design curriculum for their classes as long as it aligns with state standards. So, how has Nebraska’s approach to assessment worked out, and how does it compare to the results other states are getting? “Eighty-ﬁve percent of our kids are proﬁcient in reading, writing, and mathematics, which is very high,” says Christensen. According to the research, he adds, “you can use writing for an indicator that will just about predict any other literacy-based score—math literacy, science literacy, reading literacy.” The state supplements its writing tests with standardized exams, such as the ACT and the MAPE. “If our state proﬁciencies are going up, we expect those standardized scores to be going up, and they are,” the commissioner says. Christensen feels strongly that schools must be classroom centric. He is committed to a bottom-up model with, he says, “teachers teaching, kids learning.” Teachers, he believes, should decide how they teach, and they are in the best position to assess how their students are doing and what they need. The D teacher, not the principal, must be the instructional leader, he says. Teachers should always be assessing their students’ grasp of what they’re being taught, Christensen contends. “You shouldn’t have to wait until the end of the year to ﬁnd out that a certain percentage, or an individual kid, didn’t get it,” he says. A public education system, he adds, functions best not as “a hierarchy with the teacher at the bottom” but rather as what Christensen terms “a concentric circle model.” The classroom and the teacher, he says, should be in the center, with the principal supporting the teacher and the superintendent and the school board supporting the principal. “And the state and federal governments ought to be supporting all of that,” he concludes. It means that all the players take somewhat different roles, Christensen admits, but “they’re all leadership roles, and there isn’t a hierarchy.” It makes teaching and learning in the classroom “the core,” he says. So far, this approach to assessment has brought about what he calls “dramatic shifts” in Nebraska’s schools. And that, the iconoclastic commissioner concludes, is good for students. oNidya Baez Growing up and giving back W e need more teachers who care— teachers of color in particular—and teachers from the community who know what students go through every day,” says Nidya Baez as she talks about what inspired her to become a teacher. “I’m not saying that teachers don’t care about their students,” she adds, but the connection between the two is much stronger, she believes, when teacher and student are from the same community. Acting on her own convictions, Baez, a 2007 University of California, Berkeley, graduate, is an English-language coach and substitute teacher at the school she attended, Fremont High School, in Oakland, California. Baez’s story is unusual in the context of this year’s Daring Dozen. Though she is at the threshold of her teaching career, she has already distinguished herself in education by participating in the development of a new public school. In operation since 2003, it’s called YES—Oakland’s Youth Empowerment School. Once she gets her credential, Baez plans to teach Spanish at YES, and she’s already thinking about her instructional approach: “I want to be able to communicate with images, music, and perhaps ﬁlms. I’ll probably be teaching students who are not native speakers, so it will be critical for me to use technology in the classroom.” YES got its start in 2002 when Baez and some of her fellow high school students were asked to help in the school’s planning and design. “Our school was being broken up into what were called small autonomous interconnected schools,” Baez explains. “Fremont High was chosen to begin this model for the rest of the district.” The smaller school, she says, beneﬁts “teachers who work better in a small-staff setting as well as a small-school setting.” Baez and her fellow students were part of Fremont’s Business Academy, where project learning was applied to projects ranging from an on-campus sandwich cart to tax-preparation services. “We were inspired by our business projects to form our own school, not so much to make money, but to help the school through our through entrepreneurship.” “We’d come together for weekly or biweekly meetings,” Baez recalls. “We had a couple of retreats, and the adults helped us put our ideas into the education language that we didn’t have. That’s how YES came to be.” Little did Baez know at the time that she was helping to create the school where she’d likely start her career. And now that she’s almost there, what is it she thinks that students look for in a teacher? “I think they look for someone who believes in them,” she says. “Whether it’s believing that they can turn in their homework or believing—” Baez thinks for a moment. “I just think that they want someone to trust them.” When there’s a community connection between students and teachers, she says, “it helps the school dynamic, and the classroom dynamic, and it helps the students do well.” 42 EDUTOPIA APRIL/MAY 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - April 2008

Edutopia - April 2008 Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of the Class Cool Schools Design Reinventing the Big test The Daring Dozen Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jack Prelutsky

Edutopia - April 2008

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