If nothing else, we have learned a great deal about what doesn’t work in terms of evaluating schools. The global penchant for using a few outcomes measures just doesn’t do the trick… this is perhaps most obvious in the USA where judging the quality of schools continues to spiral downward from NCLB to Race to the Top, but around the world we see a similar story. And, we see a few counterpoints, such as the success of the Finnish school system where the focus is decidedly not on standardized outcomes on a few measures.
In British Columbia, Canada where education is a decided provincial matter and where provincial politics can actually lead to quite radical shifts in policies and programmatic initiatives, this is a moment of potential change. BC schools have been for many years now held hostage by the scores on the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), a test given to all 4th and 7th grade students in the province. Support for the FSA has been eroding over the past several years with a chorus of skeptical teacher, school administrator and school trustee voices.
One initiative, The Great Schools Project, has been developing alternative ideas about school evaluation. The website gives s sense of the GSP platform and a bit more information about the issues can be heard in a segment of a local radio talk show.
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