Matt Townsley's Profile

Critics say the change will do nothing for Iowa unless teachers, parents, city officials and others are allowed to open charter schools. Only school districts can launch them now.

It's unclear whether state officials will move ahead with the proposed reforms even if Iowa misses out on the federal money.

When we discuss the Iowa Core, this is an example of what we need to do. Get rid of the rest of that stuff. Determine what is important. And then have a deeper lesson, leading to deeper conceptual and procedural knowledge, with authentic and formative assessment. Which will lead to permanent learning.

If any of these conditions is lacking, then the grades fail as effective measures

For grades to be meaningful in standards-based systems, they must be based on standards, not assessment methods. This means teachers must do standards-based assessment and organize their grade books with standards as the set and assessment methods as the subset