New Assessments for New Learning
It’s gotten to the point where I shudder every time I hear people with plans to “increase student achievement” or “improve schools” because whenever I dig more deeply into what those phrases mean it always comes down to one thing: improving standardized test scores. And the reasons are clear: they’re easy to give and to make sense of, they provide our competitive society with some way to rank what’s happening with schools and students, and because we’ve build a billion dollar industry on making sure every kid learns the same thing in the same way on the same day so he or she can pass the test.
Problem is, far too little of what those assessments “measure” is what I care about as a parent.
I read this fascinating article about a the recycling company TerraCycle yesterday. It called the company “The Google of Garbage,” and I couldn’t help but be taken by the creativity that the founder Tom Szaky brings to his business approach. The company is located just down the road from me in Trenton, NJ, and my environmentalist author/wife Wendy actually did some work with Tom a few years back when the company was just getting
