The EASL Institute NFP has been determined to qualify as a 501(c)(3) organizationby the Internal Revenue Service.  Donations made to the EASL Institute are tax exempt.  To donate to the EASL Institute, checks may be sent to the Institute at 3115 S. Michigan Ave, #407, Chicago IL 60616.  

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Not Yet: Not Failure

One of the core values of the EASL Institute is equity.  We believe that the traditional grading system, which labels many students as failures early in their academic lives,has been very costly to the individual students affected and to our society more broadly.  When the staff at Young Women's Leadership Charter School adopted High Performance, Proficient, and Not Yet Proficient as their terminology for describing student learning with respect to the academic outcomes they found that students, particularly students who hadn't experienced a lot of success, the effect was liberating. 

As more schools have adopted outcomes-based assessment, they have modified the initial terminology in various ways depending on their own needs: some schools in New York have chosen to reflect the state's terminology, using Meets Standards or Exceeds Standards; in Oakland, California, a charter school uses Meets Expectations and Exceeds Expectations.  But all the schools have found that Not Yets resonate with their students.  Even teachers have found that we are all Not Yet in something.

Here is how Chicago Talent Development High School promotes their belief that all students can become proficient.

_{poster by City Year team at CTDHS}

The EASL Institute, and Outcomes-based Assessment

The EASL Institute was founded in response to the interest in data-driven, outcomes-based assessment from school leaders and teachers nationally.  After doing many presentations to workshops and conferences nationally, and guiding implementation in several schools, the Institute's founders decided to create a non-profit Institute as a home for the work of transforming teaching and learning based on learning targets, evidence of learning, and deep work around bringing these elements to the center of a school's learning community.

Over the several years that practitioners have been implementing the EASL approach to assessment, they have developed a number of planning guides, templates, and other tools to support their work in teaching and learning in the classroom.  Some of these guides can be used with content area or departmental teams in the work of articulating outcomes and scope and sequence.

Here are several samples: