On last Thursday, the State Board of Education formally requested a waiver from many of the onerous, bureaucratic requirements of NCLB. The waiver request is available at this link.
As mentioned during Institute, one of the sections of the waiver request is the proposed Alabama Accountability Model. There are four sections to the proposal:
1. Learners (student achievement, growth, gap-closure, and college and career readiness);
2. Support systems (program reviews, grad rate, attendance, test participation, etc);
3. Professionals (teacher and principal evaluations);
4. Schools and Systems (5% of overall score will be from locally-designed indicators).
Area (3) will require an additional evaluation component, to include student performance as a component of educator evaluations.
Area (1) will require a new set of assessments. End-of-course tests in high school and the ACT suite will be used in addition to a new test in grades 3-8 starting in spring 2014.
Alabama has chosen to replace the current AMOs (reaching 100% achievement for all groups by 2014) with a new goal to "reduce by half" the number of students "not proficient" within six years. This reduction would occur in each subgroup.
Notably, for each sub-group, the n-count is proposed to be lowered from 40 to 20.
