Shared information can be powerful when used for diagnosis and planned intervention. Schools must leave their individual egos behind and become more cooperative than competitive, serving as critical friends and viewing themselves as part of the community of educators preK-12. The process of creating a preK-12 community of educators begins with superintendent and central office leadership that is ready to roll up its sleeves and work beside building administrators. However, building administrators must take responsibility for beginning the dialogue with colleagues. Together, school system adminstrators must share the responsibility for creating opportunities for sharing ideas and making coordination a priority.
Students deserve nothing less.
Defining proficiency as a certain test score is not sufficient as a guide for quality work. A sufficient collection will give students samples of how the criteria for quality work are implemented. It will also demonstrate student understanding and application in a variety of contexts, allowing teachers and parents to view students reasoning and skills. Teachers in the same school, teachers in the same school system all teachers throughout North Carolina need to establish the same set of expectations for all students and provide concrete, explicit models of how those expectations look in student work. The ultimate goal is a system-wide collection of evidence of student learning that is consistent, explicit, and of high quality.