July 1, 2016, brings a most significant change to local school systems as a consequence of SB 364. Local systems must create a plan as to how they plan to evaluate and assess teachers and students. SLOs as we know them are now by local adoption. SB 364 calls for teachers to do at least one summative assessment of students in their classes but that summative assessment may be the result of a series of formative assessments. Furthermore the measures to determine student growth for teachers in non-state test courses will be determined locally and a variety of options are open to local systems. Mama said be careful of what you ask for, you may get it. In addition to that and the elimination of science and social studies tests for all but grades 5 and 8 the testing carried out by local systems may be significantly different.
On top of all that change we will begin implementing new science and social studies standards by training teachers on the new standards during the coming school year. The social studies standards were approved by the State Board at their June meeting. The implementation will be in the 2017-2018 school year.
The 2016-2017 school year promises to bring great change to our classrooms and schools and that may impacted even more by what the General Assembly does with the Education Reform Commission’s recommendations. Times they are a changing!