Measured Progress - Newsletter - Bulletin Board - 2005 Education Leadership Conference

“Building Critical Bridges” between classroom curriculum and assessment is the theme of the third annual Education Leadership Conference. The Measured Progress-sponsored conference will take place May 12 and 13, 2005, at the Sheraton Ferncroft Resort in Danvers, Massachusetts.

Featured speakers Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Theodore Hershberg, and Jay Mathews will share their perspectives and experience on how schools, districts, and teachers can improve student learning in today’s high-stakes environment.

Jacobs, president of Curriculum Designers, Inc., is a nationally recognized expert on k-12 curriculum reform, assessment analysis, and strategic planning. She has consulted with thousands of schools, both domestically and overseas, and has published three books on curriculum and assessment. Jacobs will discuss how schools are shifting to collaborative reviews of data and how state-of-the-art software is revolutionizing the process.

Hershberg is a professor of public policy and history and director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. He has played a prominent role in moving school districts to work collaboratively on standards-based reform. Hershberg launched Operation Public Education (OPE), which promotes new assessment and accountability systems to transform America’s schools. Hershberg’s conference session will focus on how the OPE system uses value-added methodology to assess classroom performance. He also will discuss an integrated assessment system that ties high-stakes, summative tests to a series of formative, classroom assessments to provide teachers with feedback throughout the year, which they can use to inform and improve instruction.

Mathews is an education reporter, columnist, and author who has been with the Washington Post for more than thirty years. His column, “Class Struggle,” appears each Tuesday on the Washington Post’s Web site, www.washingtonpost.com. He is also a frequent contributor to Newsweek. After focusing on finance, foreign affairs, and disability rights early in his journalism career, Mathews’s work in education took off when he wrote Escalante: The Best Teacher in America, a book about Jaime Escalante, the famous Los Angeles mathematics teacher. Since then, he has published other books, including Class Struggle: What’s Wrong (and Right) with America’s Best Public High Schools. His presentation is entitled “Are we ‘protecting’ kids from a superior education?”, reflecting his research into how schools are denying students the opportunity to take the most challenging courses.

Measured Progress hosts the Education Leadership Conference each year to offer school and district administrators the opportunity to come together to learn about and discuss leading-edge approaches to evaluating student learning and using the results to improve instruction and student achievement. In addition to the three noted speakers’ presentations, the conference will consist of four rounds of concurrent sessions over the two days, covering such topics as “Defining Standards-Based Curriculum,” “Using Evidence of Student Learning,” and “Implementing Balanced Assessment Systems.”

The $125 registration fee includes continental breakfast and lunch both days, as well as a reception on the evening of the 12th. For more information on lodging, please contact the Sheraton Ferncroft Resort at (978) 777-2500 or go to www.sheratonferncroftresort.com. For more information or to register for the conference, please contact Measured Progress at (877) 678-3787 or download the registration form.

Nationally Recognized Educators, Journalist Featured at 2005 Education Leadership Conference