District, MSU to hold education listening session
Residents can give input on education policy at a joint listening session in the Starkville High School Library at 6 p.m. Monday. The session will be hosted by the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District and Mississippi State University.
Discussion in the session will center on the Every Student Succeeds Act, a piece of national legislation which will replace No Child Left Behind at the beginning of next school year, as well as the Mississippi Department of Education's master plan. Local stakeholders, including citizens, educators and other community member s are invited to participate.
According to Devon Brenner, MSU education professor and assistant to the vice president for education, the Every Student Succeeds Act differs from No Child Left Behind in that states are freer to create their own standards for grading schools' performance.
According to Brenner, the Mississippi Department of Education is on a tour across the state to hear feedback from citizens, but none of the meetings were in Starkville.
“Local communities are invited to host their own (sessions), and give feedback to the Mississippi Department of Education,” she said. “Mississippi State and the Starkville-Oktibbeha School District decided that we would host one.”
She said a lot of the discussion would center on the new flexibility given by the Every Student Succeeds act.
“They're going to be asking questions like; What is the measure of a successful school, and what is the measure of a successful teacher?' Brenner said.
Brenner added that under the Every Student Succeeds Act, every state is required to have an education plan, and hear public input in order to receive Title I funding.
“One of the big things that's going to be discussed, and that the state has to decide is accountability measures, so schools get a letter grade and districts get a letter grade, and that's our (current) accountability system,”
she said. “In the accountability system testing is a part of that, but under ESSA there now need to be non-academic measures of school performance. Some states are looking at things
like school climate, or student attendance, or teacher attendance as measures of school success that are not jus the test scores. It's good that they're going beyond the test scores, but what we measure as a state is something that the department is looking for feedback about.”
She added that she had attended a similar
talk in Tupelo, to which very few people had shown up, and that she was hoping for a larger turnout to the upcoming meeting in Starkville. Even with the small turnout, she said many good ideas came up, including incentivizing well-rounded schools with many arts and extracurricular programs.
“We need to make sure our state plan encourages those kinds of schools,” she said.
For more information Brenner can be contacted at devon@research.msstate.edu, and Starkville High School Assistant Principal Ginger Tedder can be contacted at gtedder@starkville.k12.ms.us.