Yom says he keeps getting asked if there's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential.
"This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love."
Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will care about what you want and think and help you achieve things together.
Which is like forcing programmers into a forced Agile system....it's better to focus on improving the skills of the programmers.
The guy in Stand and Deliver was similar.
I'm fine if you want to hate on the Common Core like so many, but these points are so completely unrelated this argument doesn't make any sense. We aren't min/maxing teachers like we would with our character in an MMORPG, these are human people.
1. High-stakes testing requires exam security. One must assume that the teachers and administrators, if rated on student performance, will assist cheating.
2. High-stakes testing should be spread out across the year, with the result being a running average that discards the low values. (sickness and other bad luck should not be punished) Instead of a week or two of solid testing, do an hour every other week.
3. Tests should not come from companies that sell textbooks. This is a conflict of interest. It's not good to have an incentive to use non-standard terminology to give an advantage to schools which purchase the matching book.
4. If you can't test something, and you don't mandate hours for it, it will be removed from the schedule. Ideally you'd test for everything, but testing some subjects (band, shop) is difficult. The hours must be mandated to protect the untestable subjects.
5. You get what you test for. (see #4 above) High-quality tests are a must. It shouldn't be practical to cram for a test.
Charter Schools enjoy the benefits of government bonding along with the benefits of making the owners wealthy.
Look beyond the mechanical aspects of the problem, and consider the ramifications of testing within the education system as a whole.
I don't think that approach can scale, though. You can't maintain that kind of relationship with 50 people; you need them to enforce the norm ("do the work!") on each other.
Thanks!