Five years ago at the Wellington School, we started to question deeply one of the most basic premises of educational policy held here in the state of Ohio and in our country. We questioned the extraordinary reliance on minimum standardized testing as the only widely recognized measure of success in education. Indeed, we were not the only ones. Professor Daniel Koretz from the Harvard Graduate School of Education said it this way: “The pressure to raise test scores has become so strong that testing often degrades instruction rather than improving it. Many parents have encountered this — large amounts of teaching time lost to test prep that is boring, or worse.” Many parents agreed, wondering whether test prepping was good for their children.Was the OGT, the PARCC, or the AIR testing getting at what most mattered?
Robert Brisk
Robert D. Brisk is the Chief Engagement Officer of The Wellington Initiative, an organization he helped to found in 2019. As Chief Engagement Officer, Robert is working to improve American education by empowering teachers to deeply engage students in their learning. Prior to this work, Robert spent nearly 40 years in independent school education, including 12 years as Head of School of The Wellington School.
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Engaging Students: Kindling the Love of Learning
By Robert Brisk on Oct 8, 2019 7:00 PM