5 Questions to Identify Outcomes
While the article is aimed at grant evaluation, these questions are relevant to any new project, curriculum overhaul, or grant request. Before you start ask yourself:
- What will be different as a result of what we do?
- For whom will things be different?
- What will be changed?
- What will be improved?
- What changes will make you think “We’ve been successful and made a difference?”
Yeah, find a job! What’s wrong with you?
I don’t know about you, but this just punched me in my truth bone. I think it’s located around my spleen.
(Source: facebook.com)
Being Poor in America Really Sucks
The Pew Economic Mobility Project gives us a clue today. The chart on compares four big English-speaking countries on a single measure: vocabulary test scores of five-year-olds. You’d expect that children of highly educated parents would do well and children of poorly educated parents would do badly. And you’d be right. On average, the children of poorly educated parents have both genetic and environmental disadvantages, so it’s no surprise that they do worse than average.
Due to the pressures of the TN state evaluations that have been implemented this year, Williamson County is limiting the number of student teachers its willing to bring in. Teacher evaluations are based 50% on student scores on high-stakes tests, and county officials don’t want student teachers effecting those evaluations—either positively or negatively.
With teacher tenure and job retention riding on a top score, Williamson County is banning student teachers from working in core subjects in high school and suggesting individual principals not allow them in grades 3-8. Even though they’re not under formal policies, other principals and teachers statewide who formerly volunteered to take student teachers are backing off, too.
Williamson County is one of the main counties that student teachers were placed in around the Nashville area. I’m curious as to what kind of turn this will take for the rest of the country, as it looks like evaluations are ramping up in every state.
