Hi everyone!
I read two interesting things about education in the last 24 hours. One was an article I caught on the internet about schools moving to a different type of report card - one based on skills rather than subjects. It would do away with traditional letter grades, but only for the younger levels. The schools that are already doing it have progress reports that list the skills the child is expected to have, then rates them on their progress toward mastery. So for language arts the area assessed might include something like: Able to create a 5 sentence paragraph, then have a rating of how the child perfroms. Anyone else see this info? Any thoughts?
The other article I read was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune today. It was about a report that is proposing a more European approach to education, with allowing tenth graders to go through some rigorous testing and opt out of the 4 year high school thing. If they test out, a student could leave HS after 10th grade to pursue tech/voc training, college/advanced studies or whatever. Or they could still choose to continue on for the 4 years of HS. Thoughts on that one? I think this sounds great!
