This Isn't Mundane Stuff

This week I will tackle the latest means of so called 'school reform' by examining the 5Essentials. Almost all Illinois schools administer this survey. The measurement was created by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. The bottom line, according to the U of C, is that schools "scoring strong on three or more of the 5Essentials were 10 times more likely to improve students learning gains in math and reading than schools weak on three or more of the Essentials."

This doesn't come as a surprise to me...far from it. One would expect such an outcome. I'm much more concerned with a couple of points relative to the Essentials. First of all, I believe the definitions/criteria on some of the 5Essentials misses crucial aspects of what ought to be measured. I'll get into this over the next couple of days. Finally, some schools are going to almost naturally grade low because of decades long neglect/built in handicaps. Again, I'll explore this in the days to come.

A final thought. Beyond rating schools on each of the 5Essentials, I'm much more concerned with finding ways to help individual schools combat such deficiencies. To merely say a school is lacking in a certain attribute offers little guidance in terms of growth/improvement. It's another issue to be dealt with going forward.

Dick