AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine Department of Education, which will apply to the federal government in the coming weeks to implement a new system for holding public schools accountable and helping them improve, has scheduled three opportunities next week for the public to weigh in on the issue.
The department will submit a request for flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to the U.S Department of Education by Sept. 6, according to a press release. Though the department has released few details about what the waiver application will contain, it has published some general information on its Accountability & Improvement System web page. The application will seek to implement college- and career-ready standards that graduates must attain; hold schools accountable for growth and provide customized support and interventions; and initiate measures to promote effective teaching methods and better administrative guidance.
Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen, his staff and four working groups have been collecting information for months. Several public listening sessions have been held throughout Maine and, according to department spokesman David Connerty-Marin, an ongoing online survey on the topic garnered more than 1,500 responses. Maine and many other states are applying for waivers in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — which is President Barack Obama’s version of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind — after a decision in September 2011 to allow states to apply for the waivers. ESEA, in part, outlines a series of performance benchmarks schools are required to reach with the intention of bringing all students to 100 percent proficiency by 2014.
Maine and most other states are lagging behind the benchmarks and the gap is widening as the requirements become more stringent.
An online forum to discuss the issue is scheduled for 6-7:30 p.m. on Monday. Participants may enroll by visiting www.maine.gov/doe/accountability and clicking on “participate.”
In-person public forums are scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 21, in the Westbrook Middle School cafeteria at 471 Stroudwater St. in Westbrook, and 6 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 23, in the Brewer Community School cafeteria at 92 Pendleton St. in Brewer.
“Maine and most other states are lagging behind the benchmarks and the gap is widening as the requirements become more stringent.”
So where are all the ‘Maine is first in the Nation’ boosters? …..or did they finally read the details on the below average SAT scores for Maine and realize they’ve been duped for decades?
If you are using the SAT scores to compare states you are being willfully obtuse or you are simply ignorant. In other states only students who are college bound take the SAT. Try to use a better benchmark in the future to give your argument at least a little credibility.
In case you are new to education policy making, the SAT is the test of record, the absolute benchmark, against which Maine’s academic accomplishments are measured against the rest of the U.S.
If you want credibility, put up an argument against the College Board who has designed and administered the SAT’s for decades; or go back and review the case the Baldacci administration under Susan Gendron’s leadership successfully made to the Federal Government to replace the MEA’s with the SAT’s.
Only an “anti-education” ideologue would offer up SAT’s as a measure of how our schools are doing. The SAT’s in Maine are taken by all juniors before the end of the school year. You are doing the typical Tea Bagger interpretation of data (no doubt learned from the governor’s way of trying to emphasize his talking points.) Students in the rest of the country have one more year of high school under their belts when they take the SAT’s. Of, course you’re happy to omit that important distinction when pushing your talking point. Another basic fact that you’re happy to omit is that in Maine ALL juniors MUST take the SAT’s regardless of whether they have any aspirations for college. In the rest of the country, only those trying to get into college take these tests. But that doesn’t fit the point you’re trying to make. Another fact that skews the data is that Maine pays for all these SAT’s. Students have nothing invested and thus no skin off their noses if they tank. In the rest of the country, students, themselves (or their parents) pay for the opportunity to take the tests thus they have more on the line to achieve their best results. For my money, we should dump the SAT’s, Gendron’s Folly. The results offer nothing toward measuring a school’s success or lack thereof. The MEA’s were a much better instrument for the assessment of how schools were addressing student needs and how well students were learning.
Your association of my views with those of the TEA PARTY is both ignorant and moronic; since you don’t have a clue what the Tea Party’s education philosophy is or how close the Le Page administration’s policy coincides with the Obama administration—-which appears to have re-invented E.S.E.A. as their replacement for N.C.L.B.
Your ignorance over who takes the test is obvious….9,238 juniors took the SAT in 2011, but so did 5,665 seniors—–and if they took it a second time; what does that say about the quality of education they received? **the scores are significantly higher for seniors, so why doesn’t the State just delay the test taking to get the gain, esp. since so many are going to apply to UMS anyway?
The MEA’s were costly to design, costly to administer, and begged the question as to whether a diploma should depend on whether a student could pass the. No diploma, no ‘skin off their nose’, no incentive to prep and pass them.
The schools that the test takers wanted to send SAT program score reports to, was an impressive array of New England colleges…169 to Harvard, 128 to Cornell, 151 to N.Y.U., 164 to R.P.I., and 3,058(68.8% of the test takers) to University of Maine colleges. If the SAT’s are such a ‘poor measure’ of performance, why isn’t there a movement to abolish them as a benchmark indicator for University of Maine colleges?
The real anti-education ideologues are elitists like you who prefer to ‘lobby’ for an admission; whereby educators like myself prefer to award admissions on merit using standardized tests as a key criteria. A meritocracy—look up the concept, is always fairer to a diverse population of students and encourages the poorest student to succeed by study, not family influence!
“Your association of my views with those of the TEA PARTY is both ignorant and moronic;”
Oh? And Mooselake couldn’t possibly be basing his/her comment on your past posts?
I would really love helping schools but I can’t help but think that there is an another motive behind everything this guy does.