Students will be expected to jump through hoops created by outside entities, and they’ll still be evaluated by rigid rubrics that limit the professional judgment of your child’s teacher.
We’ll talk a good game about creating authentic task-based assessments as an alternative to multiple-choice standardized tests. You’ll like the sound of that. But we won’t go out of our way to tell you these assessments remain aligned to the developmentally inappropriate Common Core State Standards or that teachers will NOT be creating performance tasks themselves.
In fact, we might even take a real world activity like a chemistry lab and virtualize it so students watch an online version of an experiment on a screen rather than physically participating. While not nearly as satisfying as the real thing, it collects more data AND saves on materials costs. The fact that these assessments also incorporate “habits of mind,” is a boon for us because it expands collection of social-emotional data.
At the end of the year your child will have an e-portfolio chock-full of digitized bits showing “evidence of learning.” Missing, of course, will be many intangible aspects of education that can never be stored in an online learning locker. We’re hoping you won’t stop to think about all the relationship building, connections and opportunities for truly creative and innovative thinking that were lost along the way while we were busy ticking off the boxes for the many required performance tasks every child is expected to complete.