Clink! Clink! Clink!

As a middle school Intervention Specialist, it is my joy to work every day with sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students. One of the biggest struggles my students wrestle with is time management, both how they view and spend their time.

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?