The group's primary recommendation calls for the BESE to adopt a goal that by 2020 at least 85 percent of students from every subgroup statewide will score Proficient or Advanced on the MCAS exams. This means that 85 percent of students entering Kindergarten in September 2010 will have reached the proficiency standard or higher by the time they enter grade 10 in September 2020.
That this is even being considered goes a long way towards demonstrating that there's going to be some major changes to ESEA when it gets re-authorized. I don't know of anyone who thought that 100% by 2014 was do-able, and it led to a great deal of the numbers fixing that we've seen in various states.
It also ignored the reality of who we teach in public schools now: some persist in ignoring that we have children who are severely disabled for whom even reading is a challenge. They ought to be educated, of course, but to make up these numbers that ignores their existence is insulting. I'm not clear that this is much better, as it speaks again of bringing subgroups up to the standard, and some of those subgroups include a wide variety of children. The schools that have the programs that teach those children--think of the life skills program at South, the program for students with autism at Gates Lane--include those subgroups, and their sending schools do not, which also leads to an imbalance in the system.
The Board of Ed votes on this in May.
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Maybe they should consider keeping the 100% mark in place, to be followed by the 85% mark. That sort of ebb and flow in proficiency will ensure job security for the next generation of administrators who risk no longer having access to lucrative book deals and lobbying gigs once they solve all the problems they've been so kind to create for us.
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