What Really Happen to Student Achievement Levels?
Students across the United States have begun a new school year. This is a new beginning; a new grade level, new teachers, new classmates, and new experiences. How soon will the newness fade and the challenges of “passing the tests” begin to set in. Year after year students and teachers are faced with the daunting task of raising student achievement levels and hard as they try, the growth of the end of the year test scores is usually equal to or less than the previous school year. Yes, there are schools that continually and consistently show growth. What are they doing that the other schools are not? The former is usually the exception.
There have been several books written about students “falling through the cracks”. What is interesting to me is that the “cracks” and ”gaps” are expanding. When interest began in this area of study, reading and math were the focus. Now we are faced with lagging scores in science and technology as well. In a country whose claim to fame is that we are the most advanced and developed country in the world, why does education seem to fall short?
Fifty or so years ago, it was a parent’s dream for their child to go to college even if they could not afford to send them. Most of these were parents whose educational level was elementary at best, encouraged their children to learn all they could at school. What seemed to happen was that life got easier and education, though important, descended down the ladder of priorities.
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I agree with your comments, and I have no real answers. It’s something that we all need to get to the study. However, I do think there is one obvious thing we could do; do what the consistently well performing schools are doing. There are plenty of examples of schools of all types: inner city, suburban, rural schools that are constantly performing well. Then we have some schools that continually struggle. Instead of looking to these schools for help, they come up with their own ideas of what will work? Why? There is no need to. Do some research on schools with aspects similar to yours. Make a list of ten such schools. Open a dialogue with them and ask what programs, instruction and discipline they are using. Gather all the data. Study and apply aspects of their school that will meet your needs. Then do it. It sounds simple and of course there is more involved, but it’s a start.
And we have to start at some point. A question that was posed to me was “Will the high achieving schools respond to our inquiries?” I believe that powerful educators are more than willing to share their strategies. The issue becomes how to effectively comunicate with them. “Seeing is believing.” and I feel that we as educators can read and study all the research and data available, but unless we actually see and participate in the actual process prior to the implementation at our home school we a once again standing on shaky ground at best.
Schools need to identify what is working for them. Teachers and administrators who reflect on what really works for “their” students are more apt to target those areas and modify or remove the strategies that are not working. When looking at schools that are performing at a consistently high level educators should be certain that the characteristics of the schools are similar. Comparing apples to oranges does not move a school forward. Using the Internet to create a list of schools with similar traits that have a proven record of growth, allows educators to see the data first hand and identify the best schools possible for their study.