Secretary of education addresses new Future Ready PA Index
More than 1,000 Pennsylvanians took the state Department of Education up on its offer to gather their feedback, opinions and observations.
“We heard you loud and clear,” Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera acknowledged as the March 23 keynote speaker at the fifth annual Disability Summit hosted by state Rep. Dan Miller, D-Mt. Lebanon.
“You wanted to ensure what we do, the Department of Education, focuses more on the holistic needs of kids, not just one single measure aligned to standardized testing,” Rivera continued. “It has really hurt the culture of teaching and learning, mentally, in Pennsylvania.”
During his presentation at Beth El Congregation in Scott Township, Rivera provided an overview of the Future Ready PA Index, to be instituted as a replacement for the existing School Performance Profile as a measure of the relative success of schools.
By Harry Funk
Staff writer
hfunk@thealmanac.net
While performance tests still will serve to some degree as indicators, they are not as heavily weighted as in the past. Instead, Rivera said his department plans on “focusing on factors that matter in educating students.”
“If you want to ensure students are graduating on time and you’re decreasing your dropout rate, there are scientifically proven measures you can focus on that will help support student learning,” he said, citing such areas as indicators of success in reading and mathematics, English language proficiency, addressing chronic absenteeism and ensuring that students with special needs “are having those needs met in school.”
Another primary consideration of the Future Ready PA Index is success in preparing students for careers. As stated on the Department of Education website, the new approach “incentivizes schools to offer career pathways that culminate with high-value, industry-recognized credentials.”
“We know that as early as third grade, parents start to think about what their children are going to do after high school graduation,” Rivera explained. “And quite frankly, I know as the parent of a special-needs student, we start to think of that almost at birth.”
A Philadelphia native who served as superintendent of the School District of Lancaster prior to joining Gov. Tom Wolf’s cabinet in 2015, Rivera stressed the importance of recognizing that the needs of students vary.
“No one system of support intervention or enrichment will serve every student at every point in time in every school district,” he said. “We had students who took learning-support math class but took an advanced-placement English course. We had students who may have been in learning support in some of their academic courses but participated in career and technical education programs, and received an industry certificate.”
The Future Ready PA Index has been developed in compliance with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Among the new law’s provisions is one that:
“Maintains an expectation that there will be accountability and action to effect positive change in our lowest-performing schools, where groups of students are not making progress, and where graduation rates are low over extended periods of time.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac