A progressive vision for education.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Cover story

In 1997, a group of schools across New York State banded together to oppose high-stakes testing and promote a richer model of education, based on engaging students, critical thinking, and supporting teachers as professionals. This approach, long favored by upper-middleclass parents for their own children, has been on the wane for low-income kids.

The twenty-eight New York Performance Standards Consortium schools have developed an assessment system based on quality teaching and a student-centered learning environment. They have drawn increasing interest both because their results are impressive and because the public is becoming aware that the high-stakes testing approach to education is not working.

I spoke with Consortium executive director Ann Cook and Consortium teacher, author, and professor of education Phyllis Tashlik about their vision of a progressive model for education reform.

"What we are doing is unique," says Cook. "It's all built on collaboration, whereas everything else that's going on now is built on the idea that if you have teachers competing with each other somehow you're going to wind up with a better system, which is completely false."

To run their alternative curriculum, the Consortium schools opt out of the New York Regents test--a commercially produced exam that is required of most New York State public schools.

Test-prep at traditional schools is "excessive and obsessive," says Tashlik.

"We've always said assessment should grow out of what goes on in the classroom--instead, what goes on in the classroom is now growing out of assessment. It's a whole perversion of what education actually is all about," Tashlik adds. "It's hard in that environment for any kind of innovation or student-centered work or in-depth work to flourish."

"So-called reformers--look, where are their kids going to school? They are sending their kids to places like Sidwell Friends and the Chicago Lab School, where they wouldn't consider having testing every year," says Cook.

At the Consortium schools, students are asked to consider multiple viewpoints, not just memorize facts. The tone is respectful and supportive.

"In our schools, teachers feel they have control over their environment; they are respected for the experience that they have. It's almost like doctors, who are respected for their clinical experience," says Tashlik. "They don't advise patients just based on research."

"We are focusing on the whole idea of teachers as professionals,"...