NOTICE!!!! ...notice the different shifters?

As you travel through this blog you will see pictures of different "shifters".

Why? Different paradigms require different types of shifting or change to maneuver through them. A BMW will have a different type of gear shift than a Hemi-Dodge Pickup or a Shelby Mustang.

The different shifters are symbolic of the fact that a person must be willing to make different types of "shifts" or "changes" to make daily progress in ones life. One "shift" will not work in our ever changing world. Allow the pictures of the gear shifts to remind you of the need to be open to numerous ways of changing your paradigms that make up who you are as a person.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Redouble High School Improvement Push States Told

taken from EDUCATION WEEK

Published Online: January 13, 2009
Updated: January 14, 2009
Redouble High School Improvement Push, States Told
By Catherine Gewertz


Washington
Despite tougher coursework requirements and other improvements, states need to do much more to make sure that U.S. high school students are poised for success, including better defining what constitutes readiness for career and college, according to a national report released Jan. 13.
“Certifying that a high school graduate is college- and career ready can be a confusing process,” says “Accelerating the Agenda,” a call to action released jointly by the National Governors Association, National Conference of State Legislatures, Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Association of State Boards of Education.
The study reports on what states have done since 2005, when the NGA and Achieve Inc., a group that advocates higher standards and better accountability, released their “action agenda” for improving high schools. ("High Schools in Limelight for Summit," Feb. 23, 2005.)
Representatives of the four organizations detailed a sweeping agenda for high school reform at a news conference here, and urged policymakers to make college and career readiness the “central mission” of their accountability systems. But they acknowledged that the thorny question of how to define and measure readiness is one that will complicate that agenda.
"There are tremendous disparities in terms of expectations,” said Gene Wilhoit, CCSSO’s executive director. “We are getting a lot more specific about success criteria ... there is a lot of work to be done here. But we’ve taken this on.”
The report says, for instance, that 15 states define college readiness by using test scores, curricula, competencies, or content standards. Twenty-six define career readiness by using technical content standards, sets of skills, academic and technical coursework, or assessment performance. A dozen states have both career- and college-readiness definitions; half consider the two sets “substantially” different, and half do not, it said.
Faculty members in entry-level college courses say that students must be masterful analyzers, interpreters, and appliers of knowledge, and must write well, the report said. High-wage employers cite those same strengths as crucial, but add good problem-solving ability and “soft skills” such as communication and collaboration, so career-readiness standards might have to be “separate—and perhaps more complex” than college-readiness standards, it adds.
Aligning Standards
Substantial progress has been made in “restoring the value” of the high school diploma by raising standards and graduation requirements, beefing up course rigor, revamping career and technical education, and expanding access to college-level work, the report said.
Twenty-two states have aligned their English and mathematics standards to “more accurately reflect real-world expectations of colleges and employers,” and 23 more are working to do so, it said.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia now require that in order to get a diploma, all students must take a curriculum that Achieve defines as constituting college and career readiness, something only two states did in 2004, the report said.
The four groups urged states to shorten their list of high-school-level academic standards and make them “clearer in focus and higher in rigor,” and to require students to take a common set of college- and career-ready courses in order to graduate.
States are working to offer a wider choice of high school experiences by adding career academies, charter and virtual courses and schools, and early-college models, the report said. They are evolving in their abilities to build data banks that can form “early warning” systems that let schools monitor—and quickly help—students who get into academic trouble, it said.
Human Capital Needs
According to the report, an area of weakness in building better high schools is improving teacher and principal quality.
“No state has yet undertaken a comprehensive effort to upgrade the effectiveness of their high school teacher and principal workforce,” it said. The report added, “Without a renewed focus on teachers and principals, efforts to fix the American high school will likely fall short.”
To tailor headhunting or training, a state must know what sort of personnel it needs, the report said, and that requires longitudinal data systems that paint a portrait of the education workforce. Georgia, for instance, has a division that reports annually on the production and supply of—and demand for—educators by grade level, subject field, and geographic area.
With such a profile in hand, states can better strengthen teacher-training programs, a much-needed step, since “three-quarters” of traditional teacher-preparation programs fall short of producing effective teachers, the report said, citing a 2006 study by Arthur E. Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University.
An evaluation system that isolates individual teachers’ effects on student performance over time, it said, is “key” to building a corps of effective teachers. And pay and career development can play a role in improving teacher quality, the report said.
It specifically mentioned special compensation for teachers who improve student performance, or who take jobs in high-needs schools or subject-shortage areas. Eleven states, it said, now reward teachers for improving student performance, and 28 offer additional pay to those who work in hard-to-staff schools or shortage subject areas.
Attention to Principals
Building a strong cadre of principals requires freeing them from some duties so they have time to be instructional leaders, and allowing them more authority to decide who works in their buildings, the report said.
In New York City, Massachusetts, and Nevada, for instance, principals can agree to meet certain school performance goals in exchange for more autonomy, the report said. A 2006 California law allows principals in low-performing schools to reject a teacher’s request to transfer into the school if such a move would undermine the school’s improvement plans, it said.
“States can require that high schools be accountable for graduating students on time and prepared for college and careers,” the report said. “Doing so first requires better measures of readiness—such as value-added assessments that more accurately gauge individual student progress over time—as well as careful development of an accountability system.”
“A few states” are creating “robust” accountability policies, the study said. Nine now require students to take tests that are “sufficiently rigorous” to measure college- and career-readiness, and 23 more states are working to do likewise.
Dane Linn, the director of NGA’s education division, said that those states do not share a common definition of what constitutes sufficient rigor; each state has defined that for itself.
Vol. 28, Issue 18
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