Word: tracks
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USAGE Protests surrounding the annual G-8 meeting can be unruly, so the Germans want pre-emptive order. But they may have gone overboard with a $17 million fence, above, being built around Heiligendamm and a plan to track activists by using scent samples. The latter was, inconveniently, a favored tactic of the feared East German Stasi secret police...
What's the alternative to AYP? Most educators, Garris included, prefer a more flexible measure of student improvement known as the growth model. In this approach, schools track the progress of each student year to year. Success is defined by a certain amount of growth, even if the student isn't on grade level. So a child like that Blaine third-grader would be judged a success--and his teachers and school would get credit for his achievement. "The growth model," says O'Connell, "is a much more accurate portrayal of a school's performance...
Spellings says she appreciates the need for "a more nuanced accountability system," and her department is testing the growth model in North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas and Delaware. The main sticking point, she says, is having a data-management system that can accurately track the performance of individual students statewide. Another sticking point, she says, is ensuring that growth doesn't replace the goal of moving kids up to grade level. "Growth models have to be within what I call the bright-line principles of the law, which is grade-level proficiency by 2014. Moving the goalposts is not what...
...Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit, found that the quality of educational standards--which are detailed, grade-by-grade, subject-by-subject learning goals--declined in 30 states from 2000 to 2006. That includes the four states--Delaware, Kansas, North Carolina and Oklahoma--said to be on track for 2014. Overall, only three states earned an A from Fordham on curriculum standards--which are also the basis for state tests; 37 rated C-- or below...
...buying time--time for the warring factions in Iraq to work out their differences and time for the American public to see progress in Iraq before it decides whether the war is unwinnable. That time is already running out. In Washington, Bush Administration officials are preparing for a two-track strategy later this summer, quietly laying the groundwork for extending the surge--and crafting a new plan in case an extension cannot be sustained politically...