Sue Atkinson
Baxter
A short time ago, I had occasion to attend a meeting with the Heartland AEA and a school. One of the standard forms used by the AEA caught my attention because the word choice — in several places — said the student “received high quality instruction.” I have asked for a definition of this presumption because I want to know what standards were used to justify it.
Iowa standards use the pathetically low 41st National Percentile Ranking (while grade level is the 65th National Percentile Ranking), and each year schools struggle to meet their required annual improvement toward this low goal. Iowa teacher licensing has no standards at all, according to the annual analysis of the National Council on Teacher Quality, so Iowa’s teacher training programs have no standards to meet for potential teachers to be licensed in Iowa.
These same reports have continually cited Iowa as failing to train teachers to teach the “science of reading,” and the results of this are reflected in Iowa’s fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress scores remaining at the 1992 level (when Iowa students began taking the exam), and the eighth-grade scores are actually falling (because they depend on the quality of the lower grades).
The Iowa Core, put together by Iowa-trained educators, dumbed down the national Common Core for reading and math from the entry grade level of 65th NPR, so schools using this standard struggle to effectively improve student proficiencies up to the 41st NPR each year. Even the Iowa Assessments (which use memorization rather than concepts) use the low 41st NPR as their standard, thus inflating the results to artificially look better than the situation really is. Teachers with degrees from Iowa’s teacher training programs should demand a refund because these programs fail to meet grade level standards.
The Heartland AEA has refused to provide a definition and criteria for their use of the term “high quality instruction” (indicating they have no standards as a criteria for its use), which then begs the question of what their credentials are for serving as liaisons between the Department of Education and the schools? Why are taxpayers funding an entity that clearly has no standards? Having an entity with no standards in the position of supposedly helping schools certainly explains the struggle for improvement, so the only use I can see for the term “high quality instruction” must be to avoid liability for poor performance.