Wisconsin SEC

1
Wisconsin SEC

• SEC Meeting Tampa Bay
• February 21, 2005

2
Who We Are

• 426 autonomous school districts (local control)
• 1 elected state superintendent (constitutional
  officer)
• No state board of education

3
What We Do

• We consult, persuade, and advise in the areas of
  intended and enacted curriculum.
• We hold districts accountable in the area of
  assessment. Currently we assess through our WKCE
  in grades 4, 8, 10. We are adding annual
  assessments in reading and mathematics in grades
  3 8.

4
Questions We Want to Ask

• How can you integrate teaching to the test in a
  broad curriculum?

5
What We Hear

• Not every educator is happy about the increasing
  importance of large-scale and high-stakes
  assessments.
• Teachers increasingly teach to the test.
• The curriculum is narrowed to the assessed areas.
  
• Teachers dont talk to each other, neither within
  a grade nor across grades. They dont know what
  the teacher next door is doing.

6
What We Think

• The SEC can come to the rescue.
• Districts can use the SEC to facilitate
  discussion and conversation.
• Its harder to persuade than to mandate.
• Persuasion leads longer-lasting results than
  mandating.

7
What We Have Done

• Introduced new licensing regulations
• PI 34
• PI 34 is based on 10 Teacher Standards.
• Among them
• Teachers should know the content area in which
  they are teaching
• Teachers are reflective practitioners

8
What We Keep Hearing

• Teachers may know not know their content areas
  as well as they should.
• Teachers dont understand the nature of
  alignment. They align at the skills level when we
  ask them to align at a conceptual level.
• Teachers work with checklists and have little
  understanding of larger educational goals.

9
What We Want to Persuade Districts to Do

• Involve teachers in districts in data-based
  professional development efforts.
• Present the SEC as the instrument that can pull
  reflection on all assessments together, so that
  we can resist the narrowing of the curriculum.

10
What We Have Done

• We have given several presentations to school
  district staff as well as at conferences for
  school and school district leadership.
• We ran a pilot in April/May 2005 with several
  school districts.
• Those districts administered the survey, but have
  not reached the point of sustained conversation.

11
District Involvement

• Milwaukee Public Schools
• Did the survey with about 300 teachers. No
  follow-up staff development yet.
• Madison Metropolitan School District
• Did the survey with all middle school
• math teachers. No follow-up as far as we know.

12
District Involvement ctd.

• Other districts are in similar situations.
• Several districts told us they would like to
  participate, but they cited various problems
  (unions, overworked teachers, etc.) as reasons
  why they could not do the SEC at the time.

13
Progress?

• We are making progress with getting the word out.
  I received two requests from CESAS for talking
  with their staff about the SEC just this past
  week. These requests were in response to a couple
  of presentations in other locations.
• There is growing awareness of the instrument.

14
What We Need

• Money
• Staff
• Time
• A good model (in our own state) of a district
  that has worked with SEC.

15
What Has Gone Wrong What Now?

• Districts have not followed up on the surveys.
• A principal just handed the survey to teachers
  and made them fill them out.
• We are still very much in stage 1 Introduce the
  SEC to districts, engage CESAs in this
  conversation etc.