Leadership Matters Summer 2015

Save the Date - Super Region Meetings with State Superintendent Dr. Tony Smith

IASA and new ISBE state superintendent Dr. Tony Smith will host 3 super-region meetings to formally introduce Dr. Smith to our membership. These super-region meetings will be: September 1 in Naperville September 2 in Normal September 3 at Rend Lake Additional details will be sent soon

fight about winners and losers but realization that the current structure sets Illinois up for failure. So what’s a better structure? It is critical to me that we make progress on what that should look like. Understanding local needs and assets is really important. I think the idea that we would differentiate our funding to support kids who are in different places in relationship to opportunity has to be a part of it. I think there has to be a better sense of adequacy, what we would expect the baseline to be. What’s our desired outcome? We need to work backwards from that, and that’s a big conversation for this state.” As for his long-term vision, Smith said that moving from the Carnegie unit, a system developed in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries that bases academic credit on time spent in the classroom, to a competency-based system could be transformative for Illinois. “It is time for us to recognize that our young people can demonstrate in multiple ways that they know and understand and have mastered content in ways that are faster and not limited by the amount of seat time. The time they sit in school has very little correlation to what they know,” said Smith. “If in the first two weeks we could demonstrate what we’re expected to know in six months, would we put up with having to keep going? Or, on the flipside, if I go through something for a year and I don’t do well on one section from February to April, do I have to redo the whole thing? Why can’t I just redo February to April and then get back on track?”

Vocational education is part of that vision. “In my experience, when kids are doing real things they care about, they excel,” Smith said. “If they are doing work in the context of learning a skill that they need to have to earn money, that’s real work. And why are we not figuring out how to count that against a standard?” Never one to dodge a linebacker who needed to be blocked, Smith also met head-on the topic of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test that was administered in Illinois for the first time during the 2014-15 school year. Developed by educators for the National Governor’s Association, PARCC has become a political lightning rod nationally and in Illinois. “I think the promise of PARCC is greater than the promise of most of the other assessments we’ve ever had. Kids can test to the edge of their knowledge. But it’s not perfect by any means, it’s not where it needs to be yet,” said Smith, noting that next year’s PARCC tests will be about 90 minutes shorter. He said that even though PARCC can be taken by pencil and paper, it has illuminated the technological gaps among schools in the state. “There’s a use value in the taking of the test online that is powerful, the manipulation of the screen, the understanding of how you use technology. We live in a technology-based world and there is a tremendous inequity in our state when it comes to bandwidth and technology capabilities of school districts.”

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