Pivot Learning Partners Response to California Governor Brown's State of the State Address
On Wednesday morning, California Governor Jerry Brown's State of the State address spoke of his goals for education in the year ahead and Pivot Learning Partners welcomes support on key initiatives.
- San Francisco, CA (1888PressRelease) January 21, 2012 - On Wednesday morning, California Governor Jerry Brown's State of the State address spoke of his goals for education in the year ahead. He began my making the key point that the most important work of the education system is taking place in classrooms, schools, and school districts - not at the state level. The role of the state is to support that important local work, and Brown noted that the focus of the last decade on testing and accountability has not passed the test of supporting schools. To improve on this track record, Brown proposed several key changes: funding schools through a weighted student formula that would replace cumbersome categorical programs; streamlining of testing and accelerating the timeline for getting results back to teachers and schools; and revamping accountability to retain our current standards-based system but supplementing this with a more flexible and useful process for the local review of school quality. These are all worthwhile changes, and they are ones that Pivot Learning Partners is already implementing in partnership with school districts around the state.
Pivot Learning is partnered with the Twin Rivers and Los Angeles Unified School Districts in the Strategic School Funding for Results (SSFR) project that is currently working to develop and implement a comprehensive approach to using a weighted student formula as a better way to allocate resources from the district to individual schools. The governor could use the development that is underway as a model for the statewide weighted student formula.
As early as 2003, the Pivot Learning Partners study, "After the Test," pointed to the importance of providing teachers with real-time data that they can use to improve teaching and learning. Since that time, Pivot Learning has trained hundreds of teachers and administrators in its signature Cycle of Inquiry model. In the past year alone, over a dozen school districts have partnered with us to provide training through our Teacher Leader program about how to use data. This is the kind of locally supported program that a state government should leverage when it comes time to implement the Common Core Standards.
If the state moves forward with the governor's idea about locally-led, qualitative site evaluations, it will be key to treat this effort as a collaborative one with roles for local leaders including both teachers and administrators. Learning has a long history of helping to create collaborative groups of educators that can take on challenging issues such as these. For example, the North Bay Collaborative is a unique collaborative effort that is taking place in Sonoma County. With representatives from teachers to unions to district leaders, eleven school districts are working together to strengthen teacher and principal evaluation systems. Like the governor, these districts are dedicated to moving forward, even in difficult times, to take on the real challenges, but also to seize the real opportunities, that confront us.
The education of the next generation is the shared responsibility of the entire community. As a nonprofit organization dedicated to playing a part in revitalizing public education, we welcome the Governor Brown's support for these key initiatives.
###
space
space
Satisfied Users & 
Approved Press Releases
Print
Email
Report Spam