educating for the journey

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
- Herman Melville

The words above are sometimes used inter-changeably but their meanings are very different. I really wish that people, especially those that deal with educators, better understood these terms and what they mean. For instance, many SISs say that they “do standards based reporting.” Well, in many cases, this just isn’t true. Your program may tie assignments to a state standard, but standards based reporting is a huge pedagogical shift requiring a far greater change from teachers as well as the programs that they use. As the Carol Morgan School begins to make this shift we have ran into problems that have reduced our SIS to a holding area that requires teachers to manually enter grades into an excel file in order to produce a standards based report card. A lot of time, a lot of money and the end result is: having the already overworked ES teachers^* manually enter thier grades into the report card - ouch. This shift in assessing and the understanding of assessment is not something driven by technology, but now our technology is creating further frustration thus holding back teacher progress which is something i can’t let happen. I believe the move towards grading to benchmarks and standards based assessment is the right one, we have made huge steps in the right direction (re-writing standards and benchmarks, professional development and educating students and parents) we must now ensure our technology supports not inhibits this shift.

This morning i talked with Jane E. Pollack (our benchmark gura) about this very subject (thank you skype). Luckily (i guess) we aren’t the only ones with this problem - she is working on similar situations with a variety of schools in a variety of places using various SISs. From my conversations with PowerSchool however it is clear that they do not have plans (at this point) to move towards scoring to benchmarks. We are examining our options, which could involve using a different program for grading (WebGrader was recommended) and then bridging the data into PowerSchool. JaneE.’s experience has been that SISs have resisted this option - feeling a threat toward their own grading program. I am hoping PowerSchool sees this as collaborating to provide its client with their desired result - nothing more. I will keep you posted.

I could be WAY off base with this post, indeed i kind of hope that i am. If you are successfully using PowerGrade to produce, track and report on standards based assessments please simplify my life and put me in my place!

*i honestly believe every ES classroom teacher i have ever met is overworked.
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