Vicki Phillips is the Director of Education at the Gates Foundation, and a key decision-maker in the Foundation's education reform agenda; helping to guide the hundreds of millions of dollars the Foundation invests in education reform. Phillips recently posted a commentary on the Common Core that calls for caution before attaching high-stakes to the new standards and evaluation systems. She said:
It's not often that teachers, parents, and the big ed reform foundations like Gates all agree. Let's hope the Maryland State Department of Education is listening.
- "The key principle is giving teachers and students time to adjust to new expectations before they face serious consequences for not meeting them"
- "Teachers should benefit from the insights that come out of the evaluation systems as soon as they are available, but districts should ensure that there is a baseline and several years of data before using these systems to make personnel decisions"
- "...test scores shouldn't be used to make consequential decisions, such as whether students should graduate, until we are sure we understand how to interpret the results".
- "...no new schools should be singled out (as needing improvement) based on new assessments until teachers have had a few years to get used to the new ways of working".
It's not often that teachers, parents, and the big ed reform foundations like Gates all agree. Let's hope the Maryland State Department of Education is listening.
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