PROFILES AND ASSESSMENTS

Intriguing!

A Superintendent of a local school district was quoted in the newspaper stating "As a district and as a community, we must begin to define what we believe a successful school and a successful graduate looks like. We must look for measures beyond state test scores to show that we are moving in the right direction."

I wondered if he was thinking along the lines of those in Nebraska http://www.elladvocates.org/media/NCLB/Time30may07.html or North Carolina http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/graduationproject/ who determined what the profile of 21st century citizen should be and then devised processes to educate and assess students as the attain those skills. (For an excellent description of what North Carolina is doing, peruse the Watauga High School site http://www.watauga.k12.nc.us/graduation_project/index.html .)

What he meant instead was to use available data, such as the number of students taking AP classes, numbers in the gifted program, etc. in order to flesh out a more complete profile of what students in the district are like.

Oh well.