Policymakers and practitioners who face a deluge of important decisions affecting thousands of schools can find advice from some of the top education thinkers in the country in JFF’s new brief, Advancing Deeper Learning Under ESSA: Seven Priorities. The piece recommends ways that supporters of deeper learning can make the most of the rapidly changing policy landscape to further the goal of college and career readiness for all students.
The priorities include:
- Emphasize capacity, not compliance: Make it easier for teachers, principals, and districts to improve classroom instruction, not just comply with top-down policy mandates.
- Create assessments that persuade students to opt in, rather than opt out: Channel energy toward designing systems of assessment that are more useful to states, schools, communities, and families than standardized multiple-choice tests.
- Seize the moment to promote equitable opportunities for deeper learning: Reduce educational inequity by directing more resources to those who need them most, especially youth from low-income backgrounds, English language learners, and students with disabilities.
- Focus on building a professional teaching culture: The most promising work in the teacher development field
seizes on opportunities to strengthen teachers’ professional communities, both among peers from their subject area and colleagues working in the same building.
- Don’t let imaginary barriers get in the way of good ideas: There is an acute need for states and districts to provide much clearer information about the ground rules, and to demonstrate to educators that local innovations will be welcomed, not squelched.
- Get serious about career readiness: Internships, apprenticeships, and other work-based experiences can and should be seen as powerful means of learning deeply.
- Strengthen partnerships between high school and higher education: It is important to better align 12th-grade standards with the academic demands of the first year of college, and it can be helpful to convene P-16 councils to foster better communication between K-12 and higher education.
The ideas in this brief grew out of a national meeting JFF held in late 2015 that brought together influential figures from across education and policy circles to discuss next steps for the deeper learning movement-Turning the Corner: Toward a New Policy Agenda for College, Career, & Civic Readiness. Turning the Corner marked JFF’s transition from primarily gathering and publishing research on key topics in deeper learning to continuous efforts to move research into practice and policy through ongoing communications, state summits, state and district support, and more.
For more information, read the full brief.
For access to more JFF resources and an overview of past research, see JFF Research and Resources.
