Unmeasured Success: What Standardized Testing Doesn’t Assess
by Tom Martellone • • 0 Comments
This year, I’ve been working with my school staff to implement strategies that will raise student achievement and be reflected on MCAS, our state standardized assessment. The staff have been working diligently to support student learning, and I am confident that we’ll see increased scores as one measure of our success.
We’ve also spent the past year revisiting our school mission and vision. After working on a draft vision statement and letting it “rest” for a period of time, we’ve begun to revisit it and we’re now starting to craft a vision statement that really reflects what we’d like our school to become and to be known for in the community. The discussion around this has been rich in nature, with staff wanting to make sure that our vision was reflective of our work with students. At our most recent staff meeting, staff talked about educating “whole children”, making sure that children were not only well developed academically, but also socially-emotionally as well.
Recently, after two meetings at Central Office, I came back to school feeling badly because my meetings ran over and I had to postpone lunch with most, if not all, of our most recent WHOO Card drawees. Our school recognizes children for meeting expected school wide behaviors and every other week, we draw names and students from each grade level get to bring a friend to lunch with my assistant principal and me.
It turned out that a couple of grade levels learned that my assistant principal and I got back to school and sent down some students for lunch. While my lunches with students are always extremely rewarding, I had no idea about the lunch which I would have the good fortune to be part of on this Friday. We were in the assistant