This week each group did their presentation on the policy that they have been working on all semester. Everyone did very well, although it was certainly a struggle to stay within the 10-minute limit. It is really hard to find the balance between giving enough information and giving too much detail. On one end of the spectrum, if not enough detail is given then the presentation seems vague but if it is too detailed then it is just boring for people to listen to and very hard to follow. So it comes down to figuring out what is really essential.
Overall I think our group did a pretty good job in really sticking to the essentials but then some of the things we left out ended up leading to a confused audience. I think there are two really essential aspects of our policy that we cut of our presentation for time’s sake, which lead to this confusion. 1) We did not emphasize that in our policy, teacher’s evaluations are not directly linked to student test scores. We are hoping that this will help to diminish the teaching to the test phenomenon. 2) We did not mention that 44 of the 50 states have adopted the Common Core Curriculum. This piece of information is vital to our assessment policy’s credibility. Our policy implies that a nationalized curriculum is needed which may seem a bit far fetched by itself. However taking into consideration that the majority of states in the country have adopted a common curriculum it makes sense to assess the students in these states in the same way. Our plan is a one that could be adopted by states that have adopted the common core. We recognize that we cannot force states to adopt any policy. It is simply an option. Based on our research we believe that our policy (two pronged policy) could be very beneficial to students and teachers. It is not something that needs to be adopted overnight; it would be a gradual change.
One issue with our policy is that we do not know all the “how’s” of its implementation. The thing with education policy (it seems) is that almost any policy will involve money. We chose not to discuss finances of the policy for several reasons. First, it would have made the scope of our paper much too broad (we would have then had to address economic disparity between schools) and second because another group in our class is addressing economic disparity amongst primary and secondary schools and we did not want to overlap with their project. We recognize that implementing our policy requires money and probably a lot of it. As a group though we don’t have the answers and we don’t claim to. The Primary and Secondary Education system has many issues and we cannot address all of them. It is rather frustrating but it’s the truth.