At tonight’s meeting, the school board will review the district’s Annual Progress Report. (Related links here.) If nothing else, the report will give you an idea of just how much time and money the district puts into data collection. Yet, for all the data, how much do we know about cause and effect—and in particular about the long-term effects of our school practices on kids’ adult lives?
We will also have a work session in which we begin discussion of the process of drawing new elementary school attendance areas in anticipation of the opening of two new elementary schools in 2019. This will include a review of the rationale for the previous board’s decision on secondary boundaries, including the decision to send kids from the Alexander Elementary School attendance area, on Iowa City’s far south side, to Northwest Junior High and West High. Full information here and here.
The full board agendas are here and here; chime in if anything catches your attention.
2 comments:
I wonder how much of the data displayed and described in this report is required by the Department of Education vs. collected at the discretion of the local school district?
Matt -- I don't doubt that almost all of the data collection is driven by state and federal requirements. I do think it's worth considering both the costs and benefits of the effort that goes into data collection, and also worth thinking about what the data really tells us, but I don't mean to suggest that the district has much control over the costs. And you never know when a state legislator might happen across one of these posts . . .
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